The signal was taken up by other species and genera.
In the stable lot the calves responded as the French horn end of
the orchestra; and the youngest of her little brothers, who had
climbed into a fruit tree as a lookout for her return, in
scrambling hurriedly down, dropped to the earth with the boneless
thud of an opossum.
Pansy walked straight up to her room, heeding nothing, leaving a
wailing wake. She locked herself in. It was an hour before dinner
and she needed all those moments for herself.
She sat on the edge of her bed and new light brought new
wretchedness. It was not, after all, quantity of information that
made the chief difference between herself and Dent's mother. The
other things, all the other things--would she ever, ever acquire
them! Finally the picture rose before her of how the footman had
looked as he had held the carriage door open for her, and the ducks
had sprawled over his feet; and she threw herself on the bed, hat
and all, and burst out crying with rage and grief and mortification.
"She will think I am common," she moaned, "and I am not common!
Why did I say such things? It is not my way of talking. Why did I
criticise the way the portrait was hung? And she will think this
is what I really am, and it is not what I am! She will think I do
not even know how to sit in a chair, and she will tell Dent, and
Dent will believe her, and what will become of me?"
"Pansy," said Dent next afternoon, as they were in the woods
together, "you have won my mother's heart.
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