But she hadn’t said a word about the real reason of her yielding, the pearls for which she would have gone even further if need be than just standing up before a congregation and taking meaningless vows upon her lips.

It was as if Frank’s words had torn away a pleasant garment from her and laid bare her real self, the sordid self that was willing to sacrifice intellectual standards that she had with pride set up for herself, just for a costly trinket. It was as if her conscience had suddenly stepped upon a thorn with her first step into that parlor car, and it limped all the way after the porter to her chair, pricked hard while Frank and the porter were settling her bags and putting her coat in the rack overhead, hurt even as her brother kissed her and hurried from the moving train with a nonchalant wave of his hand and a shouted promise to send the blue flowers.

Constance settled down into her chair, got out the magazine that she had saved to read on the way, took off her gloves, watched the familiar home sights fly by her, and felt that vacation was really over and she would soon be back in the routine of college life again. Then she sat back and opened her magazine, but the thorn in her conscience continued to prick, and she knew she must give it her undivided attention once and for all and get rid of it some way. So she closed her magazine and put it down at her feet out of the way, letting her mind go back to that morning and the hillside with its carpeting of blue quivering flowers in the soft breeze. She went over again her confession. Had it really been a confession? Hadn’t it been more in the manner of a defiant statement? Hadn’t she really been trying to shock the young man out of his solemnity?

She closed her eyes and faced this thought, seeing herself in a new light. It had been a rather despicable thing to do when she remembered his true eyes and the reverent way in which he had looked at her. Even yet the thought of the reverence he had given her made a warm glow around her heart. Most young men nowadays had anything but a reverent attitude toward girls. Maybe it was largely the girls’ fault, but—well. To her surprise she rather liked to have this man regard her that way. And she had set deliberately about trying to shatter this illusion of his! What a fool she had been. A rare thing like that!

But yet she had not touched the crux of the matter, the real point of the thorn in her soul, which was that she had not really told him at all why she had joined the church. She had let him think that she did it to please a dear old lady whom she couldn’t bear to hurt, and in a way—at least in a material way—that was a praiseworthy thing to have done. But she didn’t really do it for her grandmother at all. Now she faced herself honestly and owned it. She had done it for the pearls. She wanted the pearls, and she didn’t want her cousin Norma to have them!

Suddenly she was quite ashamed of herself. She wondered why it hadn’t seemed before to be rather raw in her to do that. But it hadn’t. It had only seemed a good joke. She had even appreciated the sarcasms of Frank as he jeered at her.

But now, today, after her morning on the hillside, it all seemed different to her. Now why was that? Had that young man’s strange ideas made a difference in herself? Had she received a new vision, a kind of a glimpse of what spiritual things might really be if one paid enough attention to them? She was inclined to laugh at the idea, and yet she had to face the fact that she was actually ashamed of herself for having stood up before a congregation, beside a young man like that to whom the ceremony meant so much, and done it just for a string of pearls!

She tried to think what his face would have looked like if she had told him about the pearls. She recalled what he had said about false vows, and her cheeks burned. She remembered the sadness of his voice, a kind of disappointment in it at what she had told him. If he had known about the pearls, she knew it would have been even keener. And his words! They would surely have been more scathing. She knew enough religious phrases to think herself of things he might have said. “You have betrayed the Lord for a string of pearls.” What was it Judas sold Christ for? Oh yes, thirty pieces of silver! And she had done the same thing for matched pearls. Perhaps she was as bad as Judas.