The girl threw up her arms across her eyes.  “Oh, how can you say such a thing, mamma?”

She dropped into a chair at the bedside, and let her face fall into her hands, and cried.

Her mother waited for the gust of tears to pass before she said, “But if you feel so about it—­”

“Mamma!” Alice sprang to her feet.

“It needn’t come from you.  I could make some excuse to see him—­write him a little note—­”

“Never!” exclaimed Alice grandly.  “What I’ve done I’ve done from my reason, and my feelings have nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, very well,” said her mother, going out of the room, not wholly disappointed with what she viewed as a respite, and amused by her daughter’s tragics.  “But if you think that the feelings have nothing to do with such a matter, you’re very much mistaken.”  If she believed that her daughter did not know her real motives in rejecting Dan Mavering, or had not been able to give them, she did not say so.

The little group of Aliceolaters on the piazza, who began to canvass the causes of Mavering’s going before the top of his hat disappeared below the bank on the path leading to the ferry-boat, were of two minds.  One faction held that he was going because Alice had refused him, and that his gaiety up to the last moment was only a mask to hide his despair.  The other side contended that, if he and Alice were not actually engaged, they understood each other, and he was going away because he wanted to tell his family, or something of that kind.  Between the two opinions Miss Cotton wavered with a sentimental attraction to either.  “What do you really think?” she asked Mrs. Brinkley, arriving from lunch at the corner of the piazza where the group was seated.

“Oh, what does it matter, at their age?” she demanded.

“But they’re just of the age when it does happen to matter,” suggested Mrs. Stamwell.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “and that’s what makes the whole thing so perfectly ridiculous.  Just think of two children, one of twenty and the other of twenty-three, proposing to decide their lifelong destiny in such a vital matter!  Should we trust their judgment in regard to the smallest business affair?  Of course not.  They’re babes in arms, morally and mentally speaking.  People haven’t the data for being wisely in love till they’ve reached the age when they haven’t the least wish to be so.  Oh, I suppose I thought that I was a grown woman too when I was twenty; I can look back and see that I did; and, what’s more preposterous still, I thought Mr. Brinkley was a man at twenty-four.  But we were no more fit to accept or reject each other at that infantile period—­”

“Do you really think so?” asked Miss Cotton, only partially credulous of Mrs. Brinkley’s irony.

“Yes, it does seem out of all reason,” admitted Mrs. Stamwell.

“Of course it is,” said Mrs. Brinkley.  “If she has rejected him, she’s done a very safe thing.  Nobody should be allowed to marry before fifty.  Then, if people married, it would be because they knew that they loved each other.”