But the great Gilead Balm explosion came three days later.

It was nearly sunset, and they were all upon the wide, front porch—the Colonel, Old Miss, Miss Serena, Captain Bob, Mrs. LeGrand, Hagar. Ralph was not there, he had ridden to Hawk Nest, but would return to-night. It had been a beautiful, early September day, the sky high and blue, the air all sunny vigour. Gilead Balm sat and enjoyed the cool, golden, winey afternoon, the shadows lengthening over the hills, the swallows overhead, the tinkle of the cow-bells. It was not one of your families that were always chattering. The porch held rather silent than otherwise. Mrs. LeGrand could, indeed, keep up a smooth, slow flow of talk, but Mrs. LeGrand had been packing to return to Eglantine which would "open" in another week, and she was somewhat fatigued. The Colonel, pending the arrival of yesterday's newspaper, was reviewing that of the day before yesterday. Captain Bob and Lisa communed together. Old Miss knitted. Miss Serena ran a strawberry emery bag through and through with her embroidery needle. Hagar had a book, but she was not reading. It lay face down in her lap; she was hardly thinking; she was dreaming with her eyes upon a vast pearly, cumulus cloud, coming up between the spires of the cedars. A mulatto boy appeared with the mail-bag. "Ha!" said the Colonel, and stretched out his hand.

There was a small table beside him. He opened the bag and turned the contents out upon this, then began to sort them. No one—it was a Gilead Balm way—claimed letter or paper until the Colonel had made as many little heaps as there were individuals and had placed every jot and tittle of mail accruing, ending by shaking out the empty bag. He did all this to-day. Captain Bob had only a county paper—no letters for Old Miss—a good deal of forwarded mail for Mrs. LeGrand—the Colonel's own—letters and papers for Hagar. The Colonel handled each piece, glanced at the superscription, put it in the proper heap. He shook out the bag; then, gathering up Mrs. LeGrand's mail, gave it to her with a smile and a small courtly bow. Miss Serena rose, work in hand, and took hers from the table. Lisa walked gravely up, then returned to Captain Bob with the county paper in her mouth. The Colonel's shrunken long fingers took up Hagar's rather large amount and held it out to her. "Here, Gipsy"—the last time for many a day that he called her Gipsy. A letter slipped from the packet to the floor. Bending, the Colonel picked it up, and in doing so for the first time regarded the printing on the upper left-hand corner—Return in five days to the —— Equal Suffrage League. The envelope turned in his hand. On its reverse, across the flap, was boldly stamped—VOTES FOR WOMEN.

Colonel Argall Ashendyne straightened himself with a jerk. "Hagar!—What is that? How do you happen to get letters like that?—Answer!"

His granddaughter, who had risen to take her mail, regarded first the letter and then the Colonel with some astonishment. "What do you mean, grandfather? The letter's from my friend, Elizabeth Eden. I wonder if you don't remember her, that summer long ago at the New Springs?"

The Colonel's forefinger stabbed the three words on the back of the envelope. "You don't have friends and correspondents who are working for that?"

"Why not? I propose presently actively to work for it myself."

Apoplectic silence on the part of the Colonel. The suddenly arisen storm darted an electric feeler from one to the other upon the porch.

"What's the matter?" demanded Captain Bob. "Something's the matter!"

Old Miss, who had not clearly caught the Colonel's words, yet felt the tension and put in an authoritative foot. "What have you done now, Hagar? Who's been writing to you? What is it, Colonel?"

Ralph, in his riding-clothes, coming through the hall from the back where he had just dismounted, felt the sultry hush. "What's happened? What's the matter, Hagar?"

"Get me a glass of water, Serena!" breathed the Colonel. He still held the letter.

"My dear friend, let me fan you!" exclaimed Mrs. LeGrand, and moved to where she could see the offending epistle. "VOTES FOR—oh, Hagar, you surely aren't one of those women!"

Miss Serena, who had flown for the water, returned. The Colonel drank and the blood receded from his face. The physical shock passed, there could be seen gathering the mental lightning. Miss Serena, too, read over his shoulder "VOTES— ... Oh, Hagar!"

Hagar laughed—a cool, gay, rippling sound. "Why, how round-eyed you all are! It isn't murder and forgery. Is the word 'rebellion' so strange to you? May I have my letter, grandfather?"

The Colonel released the letter, but not the situation. "Either you retire from such a position and such activities, or you cease to be granddaughter of mine—"

Old Miss, enlightened by an aside from Mrs. LeGrand, came into action. "She doesn't mean that she's friends with those brazen women who want to be men? What's that? She says she's going to work with them? I don't believe it! I don't believe that even of Maria's daughter. Going around speaking and screaming and tying themselves to Houses of Parliament and interrupting policemen! If I believed it, I don't think I'd ever speak to her again in this life! Women Righters and Abolitionists!—doing their best to drench the country with blood, kill our people and bring the carpetbaggers upon us! Wearing bloomers and cutting their hair short and speaking in town-halls and wanting to change the marriage service!—Yes, they do wear bloomers! I saw one doing it in New York in 1885, when I was there with your grandfather. And she had short hair—"

Mrs. LeGrand, as the principal of a School for Young Ladies, always recognized her responsibility to truth. She stood up for veracity. "Dear Mrs. Ashendyne, it is not just like that now. There are a great many more suffragists now—so many that society has agreed not to ostracize them. Some of them are pretty and dress well and have a good position. I was at a tea in Baltimore and there were several there. I've even heard women in Virginia—women that you'd think ought to know better—say that they believed in it and that sooner or later we'd have a movement here. Of course, you don't hear that kind of talk, but I can assure you there's a good deal of it. Of course, I myself think it is perfectly dreadful. Woman's place is the home. And we can surely trust everything to the chivalry of our Southern men. I am sure Hagar has only to think a little—The whole thing seems to me so—so—so vulgar!"

Miss Serena broke out passionately. "It's against the Bible! I don't see how any religious woman—"

Hagar, who had gone back to her chair, turned her eyes toward Captain Bob.

"Confound it, Gipsy! What do you want to put your feet on the table and smoke cigars for?"

Hagar looked at Ralph.

He was gazing at her with eyes that were burning and yet sullen and angry. "Women, I suppose, have got to have follies and fads to amuse themselves with. At any rate, they have them. Suffrage or bridge, it doesn't much matter, so long as it's not let really to interfere. If it begins to do that, we'll have to put a stop to it. Woman, I take it, was made for man, and she'll have to continue to recognize that fact. Good Lord! It seems to me that if we give her our love and pay her bills, she might be satisfied!"

All having spoken, Hagar spoke. "I should like, if I may, to tell you quietly and reasonably why—" her eyes were upon her grandfather.

"I wish to hear neither your excuses nor your reasons," said the Colonel. "I want to hear a retraction and a promise."

Hagar turned slightly, "Grandmother—"

"Don't," said Old Miss, "talk to me! When you're wrong, you're wrong, and that's all there is to it! Maria used to try to explain, and then she stopped and I was glad of it."

Hagar leaned back in her chair and regarded the circle of her relatives. She felt for a moment more like Maria than Hagar. She felt trapped. Then she realized that she was not trapped, and she smiled. Thanks to the evolving whole, thanks to the years and to her eternal self pacing now through a larger moment than those moments of old, she was not by position Maria, she was not by position Miss Serena. Before her, quiet and fair, opened her Fourth Dimension. Inner freedom, ability to work, personal independence, courage and sense of humour and a sanguine mind, breadth and height of vision, tenderness and hope, her waiting friends, Elizabeth, Marie, Rachel, Molly and Christopher, Denny, Rose Darragh, many another—her work, the story now hovering in her brain, what other and different work might rise above the horizon—the passion to help, help largely, lift without thinking if it were or were not her share of the weight—the universe of the mind, the growing spirit and the wings of the morning ... there was her land of escape, real as the hills of Gilead Balm. She crossed the border with ease; she was not trapped. Even now her subtle self was serenely over. And the Hagar Ashendyne appearing to others upon this porch was not chained there, was not riveted to Gilead Balm. Next week, indeed, she would be gone.

A tenderness came over Hagar for her people. All her childhood was surrounded by them; they were dear, deep among the roots of things. She wanted to talk to them; she longed that they should understand. "If you'd listen," she said, "perhaps you'd see it a little differently—"

The Colonel spoke with harshness. "There is no need to see it differently. It is you who should see it differently."

"It comes of the kind of things you've always read!" cried Miss Serena. "Books that I wouldn't touch!"

"Yes, Maria was always reading, too," said Old Miss. For her it was less Hagar than Maria sitting there....

"If it was anything we didn't know, we would, of course, listen to you, Hagar dear," said Mrs. LeGrand. "I should be glad to listen anyhow, just as I listened to those two women in Baltimore. But I must say their arguments sounded to me very foolish. Ladies in the South certainly don't need to come into contact with the horrors they talked about. And I cannot consider the discussion of such subjects delicate. I should certainly consider it disastrous if my girls at Eglantine gained any such knowledge. To talk about their being white slaves and things like that—it was nauseating!"

"Would you listen, Ralph?" asked Hagar.

"I'll listen to you, Hagar, on any other subject but this."

Mrs. LeGrand's voice came in again. She was fluttering her fan. "All these theories that you women are advancing nowadays—if they paid, if you stood to gain anything by them, if by advancing them you didn't, so it seems to me, always come out at the little end of the horn—people ridiculing you, society raising its eyebrows, men afraid to marry you—! My dear Hagar, men, collectively speaking—men don't want women to exhibit mind in all directions. They don't object to their showing it in certain directions, but when it comes to women showing it all around the circle they do object, and from my point of view quite properly! Men naturally require a certain complaisance and deference from women. There's no need to overdo it, but a certain amount of physical and mental dependence they certainly do want! Well, what's the use of a woman quarrelling with the world as it's made? Between doing without independent thinking and doing without an establishment and someone to provide for you—! So you see," said Mrs. LeGrand, smoothly argumentative, "what's the use of stirring up the bottoms of things? And it isn't as though we weren't really fond of the men. We are. I've always been fonder of a man, every time, than of a woman. I must confess I can't see any reason at all for all this strenuous crying out against good old usage! Of course a woman with considerable mental power may find it a little limiting, but there are a lot of women, I assure you, who never think of it. If there's a little humbug and if some women suffer, why those things are in the dish, that's all! The dish isn't all poisoned, and a woman who knows what she is about can pick and choose and turn everything to account. I wouldn't know what to do," said Mrs. LeGrand, "with the dish that people like you would set before us. All this crying out about evolution and development and higher forms doesn't touch me in the least! I like the forms we've got. Perhaps they're imperfect, but the thing is, I feel at home with imperfection."

She leaned back, in good humour. Hagar had given her an opportunity to express herself very well. "Don't you, too," she asked, "feel at home with the dear old imperfection?"

Hagar met her eyes. "No," she said.

Mrs. LeGrand shrugged. "Oh, well!" she said, "I suppose each will fight for the place that is home."

Hagar looked beyond her, to her kindred. "You're all opponents," she said. "Alike you worship God as Man, and you worship a static God, never to be questioned nor surpassed. You have shut an iron door upon yourselves.... One day you who shut it, you alone—you will open it, you alone. But I see that the day is somewhat far."

She rose. "I was going anyhow you know, grandfather, in four days. But I can take the morning train if you'd rather?"

But Colonel Ashendyne said stiffly that if she had forgotten her duty, he had not his, and that the hospitality of Gilead Balm would be hers, of course, for the four days.

Hagar listened to him, and then she looked once more around the circle. A smile hovered on her lips and in her eyes. It broadened, became warm and sweet. "I'll accept for a time the partial estrangement, but I don't ever mean that it shall be complete! It takes two to make an estrangement." She went up to her grandmother and kissed her, then said that she was going for a walk.—"No, Ralph, you are not coming with me!"

She went down the porch steps, and moved away in the evening glow. The black cedars swallowed her up; then upon the other side, beyond the gate, she was seen mounting the hill to the right. The sun was down, but the hilltop rested against rose-suffused air, and above it swam the evening star.

Ralph spoke with a certain grim fury. "I wish the old times were back! Then a man could do what he wished! Then you didn't feel yourself caught in a net like a cobweb that you couldn't break—"

Mrs. LeGrand again opened her fan. "I am very fond, of course, of dear Hagar, but I must say that she seems to me intensely unwomanly!"