"Oh, you selfish little creature! It is over the failure of the prospective puppy and not over the sorrows of the rejected man you are lamenting. Never mind, Maisie, I doubt if mother would have allowed us to keep the puppy. As for Mr. Tom Robinson, he is cut up just now, of course; but he will soon get over it. How long does it take a man to forget, Annie? Anyhow, presently he will be busily directing his attentions in another quarter, until the day may come, after he is successful and triumphant, well pleased with himself and his choice, when he will heartily thank Dora there for having administered to him the cold bath of a rejection, so nipping his first raw aspirations in the bud." "No, no," insisted May; "you are so cynical, Rose, like everybody else now-a-days, and I hate it. He can never be glad to have lost Dora." "Don't you agree with me, Annie?" Rose maintained her point. "Really, you seem to be so well informed on the subject yourself--though I cannot think where you have got your experience, any more than your slang, unless at second-hand"--said Annie sarcastically, "that my opinion is of no importance." "Now, don't be nasty and elder-sisterish," was Rose's quick rejoinder. Though Dora shed no tears of contrition in public, Annie, who shared her sister's room, heard her in the night crying softly. "What ails you, Dora dear?" Annie sat up and asked sleepily. "What is the matter? It can't be, no," rousing herself, "it can _not_ be--you don't mean that you repent what you've done, and would swallow the shop, foxy hair, and everything?" "Oh, no," denied Dora, "but I didn't think a man would care like that; such a queer, gray shade came over his face, though I durst hardly look at him; and his hands which were--well, were holding mine for a second, you know----" "No, I don't know," interrupted Annie, smiling to herself; "but go on, what about the hands?" "They were as cold as ice." "Very likely, it is only the month of April." "And it is not above a year since he lost both his father and mother--all the near relations he had." "Poor man!" admitted Annie. "But you could not help that, and many men, young men especially, seem to get on quite well without near relations." There was a strain of hardness about pretty Annie, whether bred of that cynicism in the air of which May had complained, whether it was an integral part of Annie, or whether, as in the case of some valuable kinds of timber, it was merely an indication of the closer grain, the slower ripening, and the greater power of endurance of the moral fibre. "Men are not like women." Annie was continuing her lecture. "I dare say Tom Robinson will do very well--all the better, perhaps, because he has no ambition, and is content to make money in the most humdrum way as a tradesman."