She gazed through the car-window at the familiar panorama, streets, houses, and people which she now did not see.  It had been, indeed, an afternoon of snubs, such as she was hardly accustomed to receiving; and she seemed to have lost something of that wholesome defensive power she had possessed last year, the power of being righteously indignant.  Time’s whirligig had brought her to this,—­that she had all but offered her friendship to Jack Dalhousie’s friend, and he had more than repulsed her.  She did feel indignant, a little; but, deeper than that, she felt wounded, she hardly knew why.  After that moment of barrier-less intimacy in the drawing-room, how could he bear to be so hard?

Her vesper thoughts veered a little, moved from Vivian to Director Pond, who had also brusquely rebuffed her.  It was Mrs. Page’s experience that Cally had had this afternoon, and she too found it humiliating.  She had lately caught a distant glimpse of “work” in terms different from those which the dull word had worn heretofore:  vaguely discerned activities in which the best women were cooeperating usefully with men—­cooeperating equally as human beings, and no nonsense; not as women at all.  There was something mysteriously inviting in this.  She had felt a bracing absence of sex in Pond’s hectoring catechism and blunt rejection of her.  Yes, and in the cool declaration of war from Dr. Vivian, who had grown so hard since May.  Busy and serious beings these, who would not be deterred by the flutterings of the doubtless ornamental but completely useless....

“You’re to go back for Mrs. Heth, William.”

“Yas’m,” said William, and clicked the little door behind her.

Yes, and where there was no sex, there she, Cally Heth, wasn’t wanted.  Hard words these, but they seemed to have the ring of truth.  She was wanted as a woman, she was wanted as an ornament, but she appeared to have no particular purpose as a human being.  And the best prospect that life held out to her to-night was to settle down in a weary world as Mrs. J. Forsythe Avery.

Cally opened the front door, which was hospitably kept on the latch during the daytime, and stepped into the dim hall of home.  Rarely in her life had she felt more dispirited.  Nevertheless, when she heard a footfall from the direction of the drawing-room, and was reminded that papa had already come in, her combative blood plucked up at once.  She wanted to tell her father immediately that he was going to be attacked in the papers; never fear but he would know what to do about it.

“Papa!” she called.  “Where are you?  I ...”

Speaking, she had put her head through the drawing-room portieres, rehung that very day:  and so it was that her sentence was never ended in this world.  For it was not papa who turned so quickly at the sound of her voice, and came walking so straight and sure towards her.  Not papa, this splendid and once well-admired figure, now confronting her with such unmistakable feeling.  No, the wonder of all wonders had happened; and the universe seemed to hang in momentary suspense as Cally Heth looked again into the eyes of her prince of lovers.