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“I know it; don’t scold, it makes you look like Cassandra. Isn’t the moonlight enchanting, and if this weren’t a health resort wouldn’t it be a heaven upon earth?”

The broad, unscreened windows were wide open and vines of woodbine or honeysuckle framed them on every side. A lake shone like a silver mirror in the distant landscape and the elms and maples and chestnuts swayed in the summer breeze. Little groups chatted on the broad piazzas, and here and there on a rustic bench in the moonlight sat a man and a woman–two minds with but a single thought, and that thought his or her own solar plexus.

It was an hour for confidences, and I remember that my troubled heart cried out for a strong, tried friendship on which to draw for counsel and sympathy. What wonder, then, that the Angora kitten, deprived of her Laura, emptied her silky little head of some of its worries, divining that I was older and graver and perhaps would find her lost ball and give it to her to play with again.

“There’s no telling when Laura will be here!” she exclaimed despairingly. “When there is any duty within a thousand miles she stays to perform it. Mrs. Beckett has poisoned herself with mercury and Laura thinks she ought to go and nurse her for a day or two–as if Mrs. Beckett hadn’t six maids and twenty thousand a year to spend in nurses! Laura can’t bear Tom, his incurable levity gets on her nerves, and why she wants to martyr herself by staying in the house with him when I’d be only too glad to go, passes my comprehension!”

(I can’t explain it, but at this juncture I seemed to have visions of Laura flirting with the Beckett during the Kitten’s absence.)

“Sometimes,” she continued, rippling along as if natural speech had been denied her for hours, “sometimes I wish I hadn’t selected such a superior being for a bosom friend, and then again I despise myself for harboring such a mean feeling. I’m forever trying to climb, and Laura is continually trying to drag me to her level, but I suppose I don’t belong there, and that’s the reason I keep slipping off and sliding down. At this minute, if she’d let me be the groveling little earthworm I am by nature, I could marry Tom Beckett and be as happy as the day is long.”

“What is the matter?” I asked sympathetically, though rather ashamed to drop a plummet into so shallow a brook. “If you love his mother so dearly, and love him too, and are sure of his affection, why don’t you marry him? Isn’t he suitable?”

“Oh, yes; he’s almost too suitable; that’s one of the lions in the way. His family is good, he is as handsome as Apollo, and he has a much larger income than mine, but you see there’s another man.”

“Another man! You didn’t mention him yesterday.”

“Didn’t I? How funny! But after all it was our very first interview, and even silly I have my reserves.”

“Do you love them both equally?” I asked, trying to keep the note of sarcasm out of my voice.

“Certainly not. I care nothing about anybody but Tom Beckett, but Laura says that such a marriage will simply mean a life of self-indulgent luxury, idleness, and pleasure. She says marriage is something loftier and nobler than pleasing one’s self; that it ought to mean growth and development both to the man and the woman. She says that I should have no influence on Tom, and that I need somebody strong and serious to steady me. She says Tom and I would only frisk through life and leave the world no better or wiser than we found it. She even says” (and here she turned her face to the honeysuckles)–“I don’t like to repeat it, but Laura is so advanced she makes my embarrassment seem simply idiotic–she even says that the children of such a union would be incurably light-minded and trivial; and oh, Zuleika, if one isn’t a bit advanced in any way, doesn’t it seem hard to keep from marrying somebody you love just for the good of a few frivolous children you’ve never seen in your life?”