Aunt Frances, who came over with Grace in the afternoon, went home in a high state of indignation.

“Why Patty Carew and Roger Poole should take possession of Mary in that fashion,” she said to her daughter at dinner, “is beyond me.  They don’t belong there, and it would have been in better taste to leave at such a time.”

“Mary begged Cousin Patty to stay,” Grace said, “and as for Roger Poole, he has simply made Mary over.  She has been like a stone image until to-day.”

“I don’t see any difference,” Aunt Frances said.  “What do you mean, Grace?”

“Oh, her eyes and the color in her cheeks, and the way she does her hair.”

“The way she does her hair?” Aunt Frances laid down her fork and stared.

“Yes.  Since the awful news came, Mary has seemed to lose interest in everything.  She adored Barry, and she’s never going to get over it—­not entirely.  I miss the old Mary.”  Grace stopped to steady her voice.  “But when I went up with her to her room to talk to her while she dressed for dinner, she put up her hair in that pretty boyish way that she used to wear it, and it was all for Roger Poole.”

“Why not for Porter?”

“Because she hasn’t cared how she looked, and Porter has been there every day.  He has been there too often.”

“Do you think Roger will try to get her to marry him?”

“Who knows?  He’s dead in love with her.  But he looks upon her as too rare for the life he leads.  That’s the trouble with men.  They are afraid they can’t make the right woman happy, so they ask the wrong one.  Now if we women could do the proposing——­”

“Grace!”

“Don’t look at me in that shocked way, mother.  I am just voicing what every woman knows—­that the men who ask her aren’t the ones she would have picked out if she had had the choice.  And Mary will wait and weary, and Roger will worship and hang back, and in the meantime Porter will demand and demand and demand—­and in the end he’ll probably get what he wants.”

Aunt Frances beamed.  “I hope so.”

“But Mary will be miserable.”

“Then she’ll be very silly.”

Grace sighed.  “No woman is silly who asks for the best.  Mother, I’d love to marry a man with a mission—­I’d like to go to the South Sea Islands and teach the natives, or to Darkest Africa—­or to China, or India, anywhere away from a life in which there’s nothing but bridge, and shopping, and deadly dullness.”

She was in earnest now, and her mother saw it.

“I don’t see how you can say such things,” she quavered.  “I don’t see how you can talk of going to such impossible places—­away from me.”

Grace cut short the plaintive wail.

“Of course I have no idea of going,” she said, “but such a life would furnish its own adventures; I wouldn’t have to manufacture them.”

It was with the wish to make life something more than it was that Grace asked Roger the next day, “Is there any work here in town like yours for the boy—­you see Mary has told me about him.”