who had inspired him to a deepening adherence to that very principle which dictated to him today, could not comprehend that principle herself, and for his holding to it she called him "fool" and "obstinate" and bade him go away.
Yet he knew in his heart that he still worshiped her, idealized her; that she still inspired him. Confessing this to himself, he regarded her wistfully, very greatly perplexed, a pained expression on his face, not knowing whether to approach or to hold himself off.
"Go!" she burst out at him with an impetuous headto-foot gesture of her quivering body. "Go!" She was utterly and irrecoverably out of patience with him.
Yet Henry still gazed at her now unregarding figure, his face full of a growing compassion. He thought that he began to understand. Billie, so regal and so beautiful, so imperious and so appealingly broken just now, so unaccustomed to be thwarted, so utterly outraged with him, was not the hard-hearted, morally obtuse little despot that she seemed. She was merely spoiled, self-willed, self-deluded, blinded by a veil of materialism, dominated by the personality of her really great but somewhat misguided father, repeating his grandiloquent phrases after him with less understanding of their meaning than he had, which perhaps was little enough.
She thought that she was an independent thinker, self-sufficient, schooled, seasoned by her travel and observation, when in fact she had been screened and sheltered; she was soft and tenderly nurtured, a mere Persian kitten of a woman, who had yet to learn what it is to be actually and not theoretically sympathetic, who would have to acquire softness of heart and tough-
