The tears stood in Mrs. Hilbery's eyes.

While comforting her, Katharine thought to herself, "Now this is what
Mary Datchet and Mr. Denham don't understand. This is the sort of
position I'm always getting into. How simple it must be to live as
they do!" for all the evening she had been comparing her home and her
father and mother with the Suffrage office and the people there.

"But, Katharine," Mrs. Hilbery continued, with one of her sudden
changes of mood, "though, Heaven knows, I don't want to see you
married, surely if ever a man loved a woman, William loves you. And
it's a nice, rich-sounding name too--Katharine Rodney, which,
unfortunately, doesn't mean that he's got any money, because he
hasn't."

The alteration of her name annoyed Katharine, and she observed, rather
sharply, that she didn't want to marry any one.

"It's very dull that you can only marry one husband, certainly," Mrs.
Hilbery reflected. "I always wish that you could marry everybody who
wants to marry you. Perhaps they'll come to that in time, but
meanwhile I confess that dear William--" But here Mr. Hilbery came in,
and the more solid part of the evening began. This consisted in the
reading aloud by Katharine from some prose work or other, while her
mother knitted scarves intermittently on a little circular frame, and
her father read the newspaper, not so attentively but that he could
comment humorously now and again upon the fortunes of the hero and the
heroine. The Hilberys subscribed to a library, which delivered books
on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Katharine did her best to interest her
parents in the works of living and highly respectable authors; but