“With no plans of your own, you have lately thrown away the best opportunity you will ever have in your life.  Now there are only two theories on which I can explain this conduct—­so totally unlike your usual good sense.  One is that you have permitted yourself, without my knowledge, to become interested in somebody else....  Have you?”

“No—­oh, no!...  No, of course not.”

“That I felt confident of,” said mamma, though not without a certain note of relief.  “Confident....  Yet—­to touch the second point,—­as you look toward the future, you do expect to marry some day, do you not?”

The daughter seemed restive under this cross-examination.  She turned away from the maternal scrutiny, and, resting her arm upon her chair-back, looked toward the shaded window.

“Yes—­I suppose so....  That seems to be all I’m fit for....  But—­since you ask me, mamma—­I would like, in the meantime, not to be so ... so plainly labelled waiting....  I’d like,” she said, hesitatingly, “to have one man I meet—­see me in some other light than as a candidate for matrimony.”

“That,” said Mrs. Heth, firmly, “will never be, so long as you retain your youth and beauty, and men retain their nature....

“And why should you wish it otherwise?” continued the dominant little lady.  “Despite all the loose, unwomanly talk in the air, you do realize, I see, that marriage will always remain the noblest possible career for a woman.”

Cally remembered a converse of this proposition she had heard one day at the Woman’s Club.  She answered with light bitterness: 

“When I said just now that I was fit for marriage, I meant marriage, mamma—­a wedding.  Of course, I’m not fit to be anybody’s wife....”  She paused, and added in a voice from which the bitterness had all gone out:  “I’m not fit to be anybody’s mother.”

“There, there!” riposted mamma, briskly.  “I think that’s enough of poor Henrietta Cooney, and her wild, unsuccessful notions.”

There was another brief silence; the silence of the death of talk.

“You’re in a dangerously unsettled state of mind, my daughter—­dangerously.  But you will find, as other women have found, that marriage will relieve all these discontents.  I myself,” said mamma, with a considerable stretching of the truth, “went through the same stages in my youth—­though, of course, I was married much younger than you....  Now, Carlisle, I have refused to believe that your quarrel with Hugo is irreparable.”

Carlisle started as if slapped.  Had mamma jerked her by a string, she could not have turned more sharply.  The little general, leaning forward, swept on with hurried firmness.

“I see, of course, that you have taken your quarrel very seriously, very hard.  You feel that in your anger you both said terrible things which can’t possibly be overlooked.  But, my child, remember that the course of true love never did run smooth.  There have been few engagements which weren’t broken off at least once, few marriages when the wife didn’t make up her mind—­”