“I never saw such an ungrateful girl,” was Mrs. Carnarvon’s comment upon one of Marian’s outbursts of almost peevish fretting. “What do you want?”
“That’s just it,” exclaimed Marian, half-laughing. “What _do_ I want? I look all about me and I can’t see it. Yet I know that there must be something. I think I ought to have been a man. Sometimes I feel like running away--away off somewhere. I feel as if I were getting second-bests, paste substitutes for the real jewels. I feel as I did when I was a child and demanded the moon. They gave me a little gilt crescent and said: ‘Here is a nice little moon for baby;’ and it made me furious.”
Mrs. Carnarvon looked irritated. “I don’t understand it. You are getting the best of everything. Of course you can’t expect to be happy. I don’t suppose that any one is happy. But all the solid things of life are yours, and you can and should be comfortable and contented.”
“That’s just it,” answered Marian indignantly. “I have always been swaddled in cotton wool. I have never been allowed really to feel. I think it is the spirit of revolt in me. Yes, I ought to have been a man. I’m sure that then I could have made life a little less tiresome.”
It was this dissatisfaction that postponed the announcement of the engagement from month to month until a year had slipped away.
Instead of coming to New York, Danvers went off to Montana for a mountain-lion hunt with two Englishmen who had been staying with him in “The Valley.” He would join Marian for the trip South, the engagement would be announced, and the wedding would be in May--such was the arrangement which Marian succeeded in making. It settled everything and at the same time it gave her a month of freedom in New York. She hinted enough of this programme to Howard to enable him to grasp its essential points.
“A month’s holiday,” was his comment. They were alone on the second seat of George Browning’s coach, driving through the Park. “If we were like those people”--he was looking at a young man and young woman, side by side upon a Park bench, blue with cold but absorbed in themselves and obviously ecstatic. Marian glanced at them with slightly supercilious amusement and became so interested that she turned her head to follow them with her eyes after the coach had passed.