Well, what of all that? Hadn't she always known what her family were like—long since suspected the worst of her brother? Why had she not washed her hands of them and gone her own way in the modern manner? She could not; partly from pride, but much more from attachment, from a sort of grateful tenderness. She had been happy, after all, in that muddling happy-go-lucky household. Her parents had a gipsylike charm, and they were always affectionate and responsive. The life of the mind, even the life of the spirit, had been enthusiastically cultivated in spite of minor moral shortcomings. If she loved poetry, if she knew more than most girls about history and art, about all the accumulated wonders peopling her eager intelligence, she owed it to daily intercourse with minds like her own, to the poetry evenings by the fire at Eaglewood, when Mrs. Spear would rush out to placate an aggrieved tradesman, and come back unperturbed to "The Garden of Proserpine" or "The Eve of St. Agnes"; to those thrifty wanderings in Europe, when they vegetated in cheap Italian pensions or lived on sunshine and olives through a long winter at Malaga, but wherever they went, it was always hand in hand with beauty.

Desert such parents in their extremity? It was unthinkable to a girl who loved their romantic responsiveness as much as she raged against their incurable dishonesty. Lewis Tarrant had been immensely generous—was she going to let herself be outdone by him? Some day—if she inherited the Willows, and a little of Cousin Tom's money—she might be able to pay him back, and start fair again. But meanwhile, what could she do but marry him? And at the thought of his generosity she began to glow with tenderness, and to mistake her tenderness for love. On this tidal wave of delusion—and after the news that her cousin Tom had disinherited her—she was swept into the dull backwater of her marriage… .