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market that doubles the money they can never learn to enjoy."
    "Oh, you're terrible! And what do you leave for me? What do
you
offer that's so great? Aren't you as much after money as the others? Why, you don't even have the decency to make a secret of it!"
    "I don't!" Miles jumped to his feet and spread his arms out as if to embrace the gilded little French salon in which I had chosen to receive him. "But I'd use your money to get you out of all this! To make you free! To make us both free!"
    "And you're the only man who can give me this freedom?"
    "You know, I really think I am. The only man, anyway, who can give it to you and love you at the same time. It's a rare chance, Aggie. You'd better grab it!"
    And I believed him! I still, looking back, believe him. Had I thought myself a free agent, I wonder whether I shouldn't have accepted him then and there. But I had to consult my parents, and that night I went to Mama, who hardly listened to me before sending me straight to Papa's study. And there all hell broke loose.
    ***
    What I had to make clear to my parents was that Miles was now presenting himself as a suitor for my hand. I had by no means made up my mind as to whether I would ultimately accept or deny his suit, but I did not feel that I could allow my family to continue to receive him under the illusion that he was just another Sunday afternoon caller. I suppose I should not have been surprised that Papa failed utterly to understand my noncommittal attitude. He assumed, with his usual violence, that I was already in passion's grip and that I might be expected to climb down a rope ladder one night from my third-floor bedroom to the pavement on Fifth Avenue to elope with Miles, presumably clutching, like Jessica in
The Merchant of Venice,
as many of the family jewels and ducats as I could get my hot little hands on.
    "I have always taken pride in your intelligence and common sense, Agnes," he barked at me. "I have regarded you as a striking exception to the weakness to which your sex is lamentably subject. And you
know
what plans I had for you! But now you have shown yourself one of the very weakest of women! That
man
—if the term applies to him—will not be received under this roof again! And I forbid you to meet him elsewhere."
    "What am I to do, then? Not go out at all? For Miles goes to all the parties I go to. And he's Sammy Thorn's best friend. How am I to avoid meeting him?"
    Papa appeared temporarily nonplussed by the coolness of my logic. But he came up with an answer. "I mean you should not see him alone. Or by appointment. If you attend a party, and he comes in and joins the group of which you are a part, I suppose you shouldn't make a scene by refusing to nod to him. But let there be no going into corners for tete-a-tetes!"
    "But, Papa, what if the group breaks up, and I'm left alone with him?"
    "Don't ask such silly questions!" he exclaimed in exasperation. "I want your intimacy with that scoundrel to cease. How it's to be done I leave to you. What are your brains for, I'd like to know?"
    I knew when to stop. I had got all the leeway I needed. I didn't want to push Papa into sending me up the Hudson to stay with his two dismal maiden sisters in their bleak Gothic tower. And I soon learned that the surest way to placate him and to avert his watchful eye from my comings and goings was to treat with common courtesy any new candidate that he brought forward to displace Miles from what he called my "obsession."
    And he soon enough had one. In fact, it became apparent that the true cause of Papa's unreasonable and ungoverned fit of temper over poor Miles was less the latter's marital ineligibility than the untimeliness of his proposal, coming as it did at the moment when Papa had at last selected his own candidate for the honor of my hand. The "great man" of the future, his and mine, was to be Walter Wheelock.
    The most extraordinary thing about Walter—and he was a most extraordinary man—was