Aunt Helen coughed again. "You are not disappointing me; it is only on your own account that I feel badly. You will make a great mistake, Virginia. Of course, dear, you have passed through a very unpleasant experience, which I am all the more able to appreciate from having had, as you are aware, sorrows of a similar kind. But painful as such experiences are for those called upon to undergo them, they are, I regret to say, far from uncommon; and if a young person who has suffered a disappointment were to turn his or her back on all entertainments, what, pray, would become of society?"
"Society will get along very well without me," I answered.
Aunt Helen knitted rapidly in silence, and the color mounted to her cheeks.
"You will make a great mistake, Virginia," she repeated,—"a great mistake. No young lady of your age can afford to make herself conspicuous by acting differently from other people. Do you wish to be called eccentric and peculiar?"
"I don't much care," said I with a spice of wickedness. "It might be rather attractive, I should think, to be different from everybody else."
"I can imagine who has been putting such ideas into your head. In my opinion one strong-minded woman in the family is quite enough," she said with a toss of her head.
I knew that she referred to Aunt Agnes, who had returned from Europe a few weeks before; therefore I said,—
"I have not exchanged a word with anybody on the subject."
"What is the reason, then, that you persist in being so contrary?" she exclaimed in a thoroughly worried tone, laying down her work on her lap.
"Because I have awakened to the fact that the little circle in which we move does not constitute the world," I answered, rather nettled by her solicitude. "I live as completely hedged about by conventions as the sleeping Beauty by the growth of a hundred years."