But even thus she could consider the vast issues of the step to which she was urged.

The temptation to yield was very strong, for it seemed to her an easier and a nobler thing to proclaim her emancipation from social statutes than to announce before her friends the simple news that she was about to marry.

That announcement would excite something more than surprise.

Mary Barfoot could not but smile with gentle irony; other women would laugh among themselves; the girls would feel a shock, as at the fall of one who had made heroic pretences.

A sure way of averting this ridicule was by furnishing occasion for much graver astonishment.