"It's as simple as child's play. If you'd ever done it you'd wonder how people would ever be content to motor or ride—"
"You've been up—?"
"Last week at Garden City. I'm crazy about it."
"Yes, child, crazy—mad. I've done what I could to keep your amusements within the bounds of reason and without avail, but I wouldn't be doing my duty to your sainted mother if I didn't try to save you from yourself. I shall do something to prevent this—this madcap venture—I don't know what. I shall see Mr. Winthrop at the Trust Company. There must be some way—"
The pendants in the good lady's ears trembled in the light, and her hand groped for her handkerchief. "You can't, Hermia. I'll not permit it. I'll get out an injunction—or something. It was all very well when you were a child—but now—do you realize that you're a woman, a grown woman, with responsibilities to the community? It's time that you were married, settled down and took your proper place in New York. I had hoped that you would have matured and forgotten the childish pastimes of your girlhood but now—now—"
Mrs. Westfield, having found her handkerchief, wept into it, her emotions too deep for other expression, while Hermia, now really moved, sank at her feet upon the floor, her arms about her Aunt's shoulders, and tried to comfort her. "I'm not the slightest use in the world, Auntie, dear. I haven't a single homely virtue to recommend me. I'm only fit to ride and dance and motor and frivol. And whom should I marry? Surely not Reggie Armistead or Crosby Downs! Reggie and I have always fought like cats across a wire, and as for Crosby—I would as life marry the great Cham of Tartary. No, dear, I'm not ready for marriage yet. I simply couldn't. There, there, don't cry. You've done your duty. I'm not worth bothering about. I'm not going to do anything dreadful. And besides—you know if anything did happen to me, the money would go to Millicent and Theodore."
"I—I don't want anything to happen to you," said Mrs. Westfield, weeping anew.
"Nothing will—you know I'm not hankering to die—but I don't mind taking a sporting chance with a game like that."
"But what good can it possibly do?"
Hermia Challoner laughed a little bitterly. "My dear Auntie, my life has not been planned with reference to the ultimate possible good. I'm a renegade if you like, a hoyden with a shrewd sense of personal morality but with no other sense whatever. I was born under a mad moon with some wild humor in my blood from an earlier incarnation and I can't—I simply can't be conventional. I've tried doing as other—and nicer—girls do but it wearies me to the point of distraction. Their lives are so pale, so empty, so full of pretensions. They have always seemed so. When I used to romp like a boy my elders told me it was an unnatural way for little girls to play. But I kept on romping. If it hadn't been natural I shouldn't have romped. Perhaps Sybil Trenchard is natural—or Caroline Anstell. They're conventional girls—automatic parts of the social machinery, eating, sleeping, decking themselves for the daily round, mere things of sex, their whole life planned so that they may make a desirable marriage. Good Lord, Auntie! And whom will they marry? Fellows like Archie Westcott or Carol Gouverneur, fellows with notorious habits which marriage is not likely to mend. How could it? No one expects it to. The girls who marry men like that get what they bargain for—looks for money—money for looks—"