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Updated: July 28, 2025
The fault was in the man, she knew, yet she had forgiven the man long ago, while she still hated Rose Stribling. Perversity, inconsistency but it was her nature, and she could not overcome it. "If she had ever loved him, I might have forgiven her," she thought, "but she cared for him as little as she cares for Gideon Vetch to-day. It was vanity then, and it is vanity now.
Yet here again she was conscious of that baffled feeling of inadequacy, of something wanting, as if an essential faculty of soul had been either left out by Nature, or refined away by the subtle impersonal processes of his mind. Clearly there had been an error of judgment in placing him beside Mrs. Stribling. His taste was too fastidious to respond to her palpable allurements.
"It makes me curious to meet him. Yes, I promise you that I will go to-morrow night attired as for a carnival in all the mystery of a velvet mask. I may not save Vetch, but I think at least that I can eclipse Rose Stribling. My motive may not be admirable, but it is as feminine as a string of beads." He kissed her hand. "Bless your heart because you are both human and my cousin."
Vetch laughed. "Not like a short-haired imp with green eyes anyway," he replied. "Mrs. Stribling looked very handsome, too, I thought." "Oh, she's handsome enough," admitted Patty. "But she hasn't any sense. I listened to what she was saying, and she just asked questions all the time. Mrs. You can tell that she has been all over the world. She knows things." "Yes, I suppose she does," said Vetch.
She had entered into it half in jest, half in irritation, yet some sportsmanlike instinct prompted her to play the game to the end. She would prove to Rose Stribling that those twelve years of knowledge and suffering had taught her not to surrender, but to conquer. The Berkeleys were what was still known in their small social world as "quiet people."
With the deep instinct for perfection in her blood, she had spent her life in an endless compromise with the inferior. "Was there something lacking in me?" she asked now of her glowing reflection. "Was there some vital spark left out when I was born? And to-night? Why should I care how it goes? What is Rose Stribling to me or I to her?"
The first was Captain C.K. Stribling, a fine seaman of the old school, of rigid Presbyterian stock, stern, grim, and precise, with curt manners, sharp and incisive voice that seemed to know no softening, and whose methods of duty and conception of discipline smacked of the "true blue" ideal of the Covenanters of old in their enforcement of obedience and conservation of morals.
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