There was nothing in Betty's experience of life that could interpret to her mind such a point of view as that really held by the woman before her. She had no means of knowing that they were speaking across a gulf wider and deeper perhaps than has ever before existed between two generations; and that each of them, quite unconsciously, was an extreme example of her type. She turned again.
It was a commotion out at the gate house that arrested her this time. She felt that curious excitement rising up in her heart and brain. Old Sun was springing up from the barber's stool, with his always great dignity brushing that public servitor aside. Then Brachey appeared, followed by Mr. Boatwright.
The wife of that little man now caught the look on Betty's face, the sudden light in her eyes, and rose, alarmed, to her feet. Taking in the situation, she said:
“I shall send something up to your room.”
Betty moved her head wanly in the negative. It was no use explaining to this woman that she couldn't think of food. She moved slowly toward the door. She was unexpectedly tired.
“Where are you going?” asked the older woman shortly.
“I've got to be by myself,” said Betty, apparently less resentful now. It was more a rather faint statement of fact. And she went on out, not so much as answering Mrs. Boatwright's final “But you will not promise?” It wasn't even certain that she heard.
3
Mrs. Boatwright stood thinking. Betty had run up the stairs. The two men were coming slowly across the courtyard, talking. Or her husband was talking; she could hear his light voice. The other man was silent; a gloomy figure in knickerbockers. She studied him. Already he was catalogued in her mind, and permanently. For nothing that might happen to present Brachey in another light could ever, now, shake her judgment of him. No new evidence of ability or integrity in the man or of genuine misfortune in marriage, would influence her. No play of sympathy, no tolerant reflectiveness, would for a moment occupy her mind. She was a New Englander, with the old non-conformist British insistence on conduct and duty bred in her bone. Her emotional nature was almost the granite of her native lulls. And she was strong as that granite. She feared nothing, shrank from nothing, that could be classified as duty. No Latin flexibility ever softened her vigorous expression of independent thought. Her duty, now, was clear.
She went out into the hall and opened the door.