She had been refused. "I am hard hit," she admitted, and her face quivered. However, she could stand being hit! She could take her medicine, and not make faces. Arthur Weston had said that about her, and she liked to remember it.
Suddenly her mind veered away into all sorts of unrelated things. Queer that Howard cared so much for shells. He had found that pearl in a shell; the pearl that she had thought—oh, what a fool she had been!—was meant for her. That old seed-pearl set of her mothers', pin and ear-rings, would make a dandy pendant. She believed she'd ask her mother for it. Except on this shell-digging business, how entirely Howard and she agreed about everything! Few men and girls were so in accord, mentally. Imagine Howard trying to talk to any of the girls of her set—even to Laura—as he talked to her! Why, Laura would be dumb when he got on the things that were worth-while. He had once said that he would rather talk to her than any girl he knew; no—it was to "any man" he knew. For a moment the old pride rose—then fell. She almost wished he had said to "any girl." Well; no girl—or man, either—could have done better than she did on that poster scheme. Howard would say so when she would tell him about it, and she was going to tell him; she was going to talk to him just as she had always talked—about everything on earth! She must; or else he would think that she was ... hard hit; and that she simply couldn't bear! The poster scheme reminded her of some league work she had neglected in these five days of tingling emptiness, and she frowned. "Gracious! I must attend to that," she said. She did not know it, but her bruised mind was fleeing for shelter into trivialities. Suddenly she took her purse out of her pocket, thrust a thumb and finger into the place where she kept her visiting-cards, and took out a burnt match. She looked at it for a moment with a grunt of bitter laughter; then, finding a little stick, dug a hole in the path, laid the match in, covered it, and stepped on it, hard.
"That is the end," she said.
After a while she realized that she was cold, and went back into the house and kindled a fire. She sat down on a hassock, and stretched out her hands to the blaze. The sunshine came through the uncurtained window and laid a finger on the soot on the chimney back; its faint iridescence caught her eye. Was it only Monday night that she and Howard had sat here by the fire, and he had kicked the logs together on the andirons, and the sparks had caught in the soot and spread and spread in marching rosettes? Why, it seemed years! It was then that she had—asked him.
She wasn't ashamed of it! She had proposed and been refused. "He thought it was stunning in me to do it; he said so! He feels as I do about the equality of men and women in this kind of thing, as well as everything else. Of course, he may have said so just to—to make it easier for me? If I thought that—"
The blood rushed into her face. She would not think that! It would be unendurable to think he had not been sincere. "He felt it was perfectly all right for me to be the one to speak. And it was!"
Of course it was. There was nothing for her to be ashamed of. She herself had once refused an offer of marriage, and certainly the rejected suitor had not seemed to suffer any pangs of shame! He had displayed a rather mean anger: "He wanted my money, and he was hopping mad when he couldn't get it. I didn't want to get anything. I only wanted to give! So why don't I brace up? I had a right to 'give.'"
She was quite certain that she had a right, so why was she so miserable? So—ashamed.
In spite of herself she said the word. She had shied away from it, and refused to utter it, a dozen times; but at last, here, alone, she had to tell herself the truth.
She was ashamed.