And now Mary's head went up.
"I haven't decided, Porter." She was fighting for freedom.
"But Constance needs you, Mary--and you need her."
"Oh, no," Mary said, brokenly, "Constance doesn't need me. She has
Gordon and the baby. Nobody needs me--now."
Roger saw the quick blood flame in Porter's face. He felt it flame in
his own. And just for one fleeting moment, over the bowed head of the
girl, the challenging eyes of the two men met.
Aunt Frances, who came over with Grace in the afternoon, went home in a
high state of indignation.
"Why Patty Carew and Roger Poole should take possession of Mary in that
fashion," she said to her daughter at dinner, "is beyond me. They
don't belong there, and it would have been in better taste to leave at
such a time."
"Mary begged Cousin Patty to stay," Grace said, "and as for Roger
Poole, he has simply made Mary over. She has been like a stone image
until to-day."
"I don't see any difference," Aunt Frances said. "What do you mean,
Grace?"
"Oh, her eyes and the color in her cheeks, and the way she does her
hair."
"The way she does her hair?" Aunt Frances laid down her fork and
stared.
"Yes. Since the awful news came, Mary has seemed to lose interest in
everything. She adored Barry, and she's never going to get over
it--not entirely. I miss the old Mary." Grace stopped to steady her
voice. "But when I went up with her to her room to talk to her while
she dressed for dinner, she put up her hair in that pretty boyish way
that she used to wear it, and it was all for Roger Poole."
"Why not for Porter?"
"Because she hasn't cared how she looked, and Porter has been there
every day. He has been there too often."
"Do you think Roger will try to get her to marry him?"
"Who knows? He's dead in love with her. But he looks upon her as too
rare for the life he leads. That's the trouble with men. They are
afraid they can't make the right woman happy, so they ask the wrong
one. Now if we women could do the proposing----"
"Grace!"
"Don't look at me in that shocked way, mother. I am just voicing what
every woman knows--that the men who ask her aren't the ones she would
have picked out if she had had the choice. And Mary will wait and
weary, and Roger will worship and hang back, and in the meantime Porter
will demand and demand and demand--and in the end he'll probably get
what he wants."