Their stay in the woods was drawing to an
end. Soon they would be off for Lenox, for her Uncle Dan's, where
there would be many people about and small, perhaps no,
opportunity for direct and quick action and result. She reviewed
her conduct and felt that she had no reason to reproach herself
for not having made an earlier beginning in what she now saw
should have been her tactics with her "wild man." How could she,
inexpert, foresee what was mockingly obvious to hindsight? Only by
experiment and failure is the art of success learned. Her original
plan had been the best possible, taking into account her lack of
knowledge of male nature and the very misleading indications of
his real character she had got from him. In her position would not
almost any one have decided that the right way to move him was by
holding him at respectful distance and by indirect talk, with the
inevitable drift of events doing the principal work--gradually
awakening him to the responsibilities and privileges which his
entry into a higher social station implied?
But no time must now be lost; the new way, which experience had
revealed, must be taken forthwith and traveled by forced marches.
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