The heat was oppressive. Miss Gibbie turned off all lights save the one on the candle-stand by the high mahogany bed, with its valance of white pique¹, drew the large wing chair close to the open window and sat down in it. Over her gown she had put on a mandarin² coat bought somewhere in China, and on her feet were the slippers³ embroidered⁴ for her by a Japanese girl she had sent to a hospital in Nagasaki.  
The moon, coming out of its hiding place, for a moment poised⁵ clear and cool in a trough of gray banked by curling clouds of black, sent a thread of pale light upon the golden dragons on the coat, flashed on the slippers, and was lost in the darkness under which it darted⁶. Miss Gibbie, watching, nodded toward it, and tapped the stool on which her feet rested with the tip of her toes.
 
"The moon is like one's self," she said. "Go where you will you can't get rid of it. Spooky thing, a moon. One big eye. Don't like it!"
 
She lay back in her chair and rested her hands on its arms. From the garden below the night wind brought soft fragrance⁷ of lilacs and crepe-myrtle, of bleeding-heart and wall-flower, of cow-slips and candy-tuft, and as they blew in and out, like the touch of unseen hands, they stirred old memories—made that which was dead, alive again.
 
"You're a fool, Gibbie Gault—a fool! You are too old to care as you care; too old to take up what you've turned your back on all these years. You are too old—too old!"
 
Suddenly she sat up. "Too old, am I? I'll see about that! The tail end of anything isn't its valuable part, and of a life it's usually useless, but it is all I have left, and I'll be jammed if I don't do something with it. And were I a man I wouldn't say I'll be jammed. Men have so many advantages over women!"
 
Again she leaned back in her chair and tapped its arms with her long, slender fingers. "I wonder how long I have to live. One—five—ten years? What puppets we humans are—what puppets! Born without permission, dying when it is neither pleasant nor convenient, we are made to march or crawl through life on the edge of a precipice⁸ from which at any moment we may be knocked over. And we're told we should believe the experience is a privilege!" Both hands were lifted. "A privilege! Mary thinks it is, thinks parts of it very pleasant, but Mary never was a field in which she didn't find a four-leaf clover, and I never saw one in which I did. 'Look for it,' she tells me." She shook her head. "It isn't that. The pitiful part of life is when one cares so little for what life gives!"
 
The tips of her fingers were brought together, then opened and shut mechanically. "And once I cared so much! Who doesn't care when they are young and wonderful things are ahead? Who doesn't care? And now to be caring again after the long, long, useless years! To be caring again!"
 
She closed her eyes and smiled a queer, twisted little smile. "It's got me!" she said. "Old or not, it's got me! and it's a poor life that it doesn't get! But who would have thought at your age, Gibbie Gault, you would let another life do with yours what it will? And that's what you are doing; you are letting Mary Cary do with you what she will! Well, suppose I am?" The keen gray eyes opened with a snap, and without warning stinging tears sprang in them. "Suppose I am? I've been a selfish old fool and shut out the only thing worth the having in life, and do you think now it's given me I am going to turn my back on it? In all this big world sheis the only person who really loves me—the only one I really love. And do you think?"—she nodded fiercely as if to some one before her, then crumpled⁹ in a sudden heap in her chair. "Oh, God, don't let her go out of my life! I'm an old woman and she's all I've got! All I've got!"
 
For some moments she lay still, then reached out for her handkerchief. "What a variety of fools one female can be! Sit up and behave yourself, Gibbie Gault! You came near making a bargain with the Lord then, and if there's one thing more than another that must be hard for Him to have patience with it's a person who tries to make a deal with Him. 'Prosper¹⁰ me and I'll pray you' is the prayer of many. 'Keep evil from me; hold death back; take care of me, and I'll build a new church, send out a missionary¹¹, give my tenth and over! Don't hurt me, and I'll be good!' Who doesn't pray like that some time or other in life? Well, you came near doing it yourself. Propitiation is an instinct, and money is all some have to offer as a bribe¹². To love mercy, to deal justly, and to walk humbly¹³ with one's Maker¹⁴ are terms too hard for most of us. Much easier to dope one's conscience with money. It's the only thing I've got, money is, and there have been times when I'd have given its every dollar for the thing it couldn't get. I came near mentioning it just now!"
 
She wiped her eyes resentingly, rubbed her cheeks none too gently, then opened her handkerchief and smoothed it into damp folds.
 
"Tears! Who would believe Gibbie Gault had a tear duct!" She shook her head. "Gibbie Gault has everything every other woman has, and if she chooses to hide a hungry heart under a sharp tongue whose business is it? People may talk about her as much as they please, but they sha'n't feel sorry for her!" She threw her handkerchief on the table. "What idiots we are to go masquerading through life! All playing a part—all! Pretending not to care when we do care. Pretending we do when we don't. What a shabby little sham¹⁵ most of this thing called life is! What a shabby little sham!"
 
She changed her position, recrossed her feet and folded her arms. "If Mary were here she would say I needed a pill. Perhaps I need two, but not the pink ones already prepared. Everybody has a pill that's hard to swallow. /My/ pill might go down easily with some, and over theirs I might not blink, but—Well, a pill is a pill; facts are facts, and old age is old age. The thing is to face what is, shake your fist at it if necessary, but never meet it, if disagreeable, half-way. I never meet anything half-way. But it's a cruel trick time plays on us, this making of body and brain a withered¹⁶, wrinkled thing, whimpering for warmth and food and sleep, and babbling¹⁸ of the past. It's a cruel trick!"
 
Out on the still air the clock in St. John's church steeple struck twelve strokes with clear deliberation. From the hall below they were repeated, and from the mantel behind her the hour chimed softly. She closed her eyes. "Twelve o'clock! Time for ladies of my age to be in bed. Not going to bed! And my age hasn't yet reached the babbling-of-the-past stage. It will never reach that, Gibbie. Never!"
 
Was it a hundred or a thousand years ago that she used to sit on this same stool at her father's knees and recite Latin verbs to him, and as reward have him read her tales of breathless adventure and impossible happenings, all the more delicious because forbidden by her prosaic¹⁹ mother? She was seven when her mother died, but she barely remembered her, and had she lived they would hardly have been great friends. Her mother's pride was in pickles²⁰ and preserves and brandy peaches; in parties where the table groaned²¹, the servants also, and in the looking well after the ways of her household. But of a child's heart and imagination she knew little. She was a true woman, but a housekeeper²² had taken her place, and neither her father nor herself had been seriously affected²³ by her death.
 
And what splendid comrades she and her father were after her mother left them! He would let no one teach her but himself, and how he loved to show her off to his friends, putting her on top of the dining-room table and making her recite in Latin bits from an ode of Horace, in French a fable²⁴ of La Fontaine's, in English a sonnet²⁵ of Shelley or extracts from Shakespeare's plays, and then letting her dance the heel-and-toe shuffle²⁶ taught her secretly by the darkies on the place. What a selfish little pig she had been allowed to be! How selfish both of them had been! Their books a passion, travel their delight, most people but persons who bored or bothered, they had lived largely apart, come and gone as they chose, cared little for what others said or thought; and yet when the war came they were back, passionate²⁷ defenders²⁸ of their cause, and in their hearts hot hate for those who sought to crush it.
 
And then it was pride measured its lance with love, and won. The awakening²⁹ of her womanhood and the mockery of life had come together, hand in hand, and henceforth she was another creature.
 
In her chair Miss Gibbie shivered. It was not the sudden gust³⁰ of wind that caused the sudden chill, but the scent³¹ of the micrafella roses just under the window which the wind had brought; and her arms, interlocked, were pressed closer to her breast. "Gibbie Gault, what a fool you are!" she said, under her breath. "But how much bigger a fool you were nearly fifty years ago!"
 
Seventeen. Young, vivid, brilliant, beautiful. Yes, beautiful! Nothing is so beautiful as youth, and she had much more than youth. The gods had been good to her up to then, and then they taunted³² her, made spring in her heart love for one only—love that must be crushed and killed, for the man who alone could inspire it wore the hated blue, was there to fight against her people, and never must she marry him, she told herself. On a visit North she had met him, and it was a whim¹⁷ of fate that he should be captain of one of the companies taking possession of Yorkburg, with headquarters in the Roy house, next to her own. A whim of fate! Friend and foe³³ they met daily, and battle was never waged more hotly than was theirs. On his part, determination that never yields. On hers, pride that never surrenders. And then one day there was a change of orders. His regiment³⁴ was sent away and to battle. Lest the horror, the terror of it all undo³⁵ her, she had bid him go, refused to promise in the years to come she would ever be his wife, and the look on his fin............