That afternoon and evening her reckless levity and open coquetry
secured unfavorable comment not only from the artist, but from
others far more indifferent, whose attention she half compelled by
a manner that did not suggest spring violets.

Van Berg was disgusted. He was less versed in human nature than
art, and did not recognize in the forced and obtrusive gayety the
effort to stifle the voice of an aroused conscience. Even to her
blunted sense of right it seemed a hateful and disgraceful truth
that a stranger had helped her father towards manhood, an that she
had destroyed the transient and salutary influence. Her complacency
had been disturbed from the time her cousin had repeated Van Berg's
remark, "I could not speak civilly to a lady that I had just seen
giggling and flirting through one of Beethoven's finest symphonies;"
and now, through an unexpected chain of circumstances, she had,
for the first time in her life, reached a point of self-disgust and
self-loathing. Such a moral condition is evil's opportunity when
a disposition towards penitence or reform is either absent or
resisted. The thought, therefore, of her father's drunkenness that
day, and of herself as the immediate cause, made her so wretched and
reckless that she tried to forget her miserable self in excitement,
as he had in lethargy. Even her mother chided her, asking if she
did not "remember the day."

"Indeed, I shall have occasion to remember it," was her ambiguous
answer; "but Mondays in the country are always blue, and I'll do
my repenting then. If I were a good Catholic I'd hunt up a priest
to-morrow."