You've done your duty. I'm not worth bothering about. I'm not going
to do anything dreadful. And besides--you know if anything _did_
happen to me, the money would go to Millicent and Theodore."

"I--I don't want anything to happen to you," said Mrs. Westfield,
weeping anew.

"Nothing will--you know I'm not hankering to die--but I don't mind
taking a sporting chance with a game like that."

"But what good can it possibly do?"

Hermia Challoner laughed a little bitterly. "My dear Auntie, my life
has not been planned with reference to the ultimate possible good.
I'm a renegade if you like, a hoyden with a shrewd sense of personal
morality but with no other sense whatever. I was born under a mad
moon with some wild humor in my blood from an earlier incarnation and
I can't--I simply _can't_ be conventional. I've tried doing as
other--and nicer--girls do but it wearies me to the point of
distraction. Their lives are so pale, so empty, so full of
pretensions. They have always seemed so. When I used to romp like a
boy my elders told me it was an unnatural way for little girls to
play. But I kept on romping. If it hadn't been natural I shouldn't
have romped. Perhaps Sybil Trenchard is natural--or Caroline Anstell.
They're conventional girls--automatic parts of the social machinery,
eating, sleeping, decking themselves for the daily round, mere things
of sex, their whole life planned so that they may make a desirable
marriage. Good Lord, Auntie! And whom will they marry? Fellows like
Archie Westcott or Carol Gouverneur, fellows with notorious habits
which marriage is not likely to mend. How could it? No one expects