"Do you mean," asked Mrs. LeGrand, "that, against your counsel and advice, Hagar is really going headstrongly on to do this silly thing?"
"Apparently so. She is," said the Colonel, "of age. There again was a mistake--to let women come of age. Perpetual minors--"
Mrs. LeGrand laughed. "Colonel, you are not very gallant!"
The Colonel turned to her. "Oh, my dear friend, you're not the modern, unwomanly type that professes to see something degrading in the subordination that God and Nature have decreed for woman! Gallant! That's just what I am. Knights and gallantry were for the type that's vanishing, though"--he bowed to Mrs. LeGrand, who had not a little of her old beauty left--"though here and there is left a shining example!"
Mrs. LeGrand used her fan. "Oh, Colonel, there are many of us who like the old ways best."
Ralph drummed with his fingers upon the table. "To come back to Hagar--"
She was dressed in white; she was a little thin and pale, for the last weeks had been trying ones. Habitually she had a glancing way of ranging from an appearance of youth almost girlish to a noble look of young maturity. To-day she looked her thirty-one years, but looked them regally.
Once the Colonel would not have hesitated to hector her, Miss Serena peevishly to blame what she could not understand, Mrs. LeGrand to attempt smoothly to put her down. All that seemed impossible now. There was about her the glamour of successful work, of a known person. Mrs. LeGrand had recently purchased a "Who's Who," and had found her there. _Ashendyne, Hagar, author; b. Gilead Balm, in Virginia_, and so on. From various chronicles of the realm of contemporary literature she had gathered that Hagar's name would be found in yet more exclusive lists than "Who's Who." Of course, all in the room had read much of what she had written, and equally, of course, each of the four had, for temperamental reasons, spokenly or unspokenly depreciated it. But all knew that she had--though they could not see the justice of her having--that standing in the world. Mrs. LeGrand always, with patrons, smoothly brought it in that she had been a pupil at Eglantine. None of them knew how much she made by her writing; it was to be supposed it was something, seeing that she was coolly throwing away a million dollars. There was likewise the glamour of much absence in foreign lands; the undefined feeling that here were novelties of experience and adventure, ground with which she was familiar and they were not. Of experience and adventure in psychical lands they took no account. But it was undeniable that her knowing Europe and Asia and Africa added to the already considerable difficulty in properly expressing to Hagar how criminally foolish she was being. Added to that, there was something in herself that prevented it.