immense favorite. There were excellent reasons for this: she was lovely
to look at, she would inherit a great deal of money, she had charming
natural manners, and she was sweet-tempered.

During her second season she had an unpleasant experience. She had
almost reached an understanding with a certain young man with whom she
fancied herself in love. They were spending a Saturday to Monday at a
great place on Long Island. On Sunday night, her host, a man old enough
to be her father, invited her to see his rose garden by moonlight. She
accepted this invitation as a matter of course. Pacing down a path
between tall privet hedges, her host, who for some minutes seemed to
have lost the use of his tongue, made her a sudden impassioned
declaration of love, seized her in his arms, and kissed her wherever he
could with a kind of dreadful fury. For half a minute she stood still as
a statue. Then, crimson with shame and anger, she wrenched free, and
struck him heavy blows on the face and head with her strong young fists.
She beat him, not indeed to insensibility, but to his senses. They
returned to the house after a time, and entered the drawing-room talking
in lazy, natural voices and praising the beauty of the night and of the
garden. Not even Barbara's lover suspected that anything out of the
common had happened.

Barbara, having played half a dozen rubbers of bridge with the great
skill and sweet temper which were natural to her, excused herself, went
to her room, and cried half the night. It was not the shame of having
been forcibly kissed that sickened her of herself, but the
unforgettable, unforgivable fact that toward the last of that furious
kissing she had found a certain low feline pleasure in the kisses. She
wished that she might die, or, infinitely better, that she had never
been born.