"Of course I object," cried Dora, tingling with mortification and shame. "That is, I should object to his having a shop, if I had ever thought of him for a single moment in that light. I cannot imagine what put me into his head--in that sense. Indeed I cannot believe it yet. I am sure it is just some nonsense on the part of the rest of you to tease me." "No, no," Annie hastened to contradict her. "It is sober reality. He has said something to father; you know he has, mother owned it." "He has been meeting us and throwing himself in our way everywhere," broke in the irrepressible Rose and May. "He has been coming and coming here," resumed Annie, "where, as we don't happen to have a brother, there is not even another young man to form an excuse for his coming. We cannot so much as pretend, when people remark on his visits, that he has come ever since we remember, and is as familiar with us as we are with ourselves. No doubt, in a little town like this, everybody who has the least claim to be a gentleman or a lady, knows every other gentleman or lady--after a fashion. But naturally father and mother were not intimate with the late Mr. and Mrs. Robinson; and we--that is, Tom and we girls--are not so near each other in age as to have been brought together by our respective nurses. We did not pick daisies in company, or else pull each other's hair, and slap each other's faces, according to our varying moods. Tom Robinson is four or five years older than I, not to speak of Dora." "He stopped us this very morning," Rose again joined in the chorus, "when May and I were going with the Hewetts to gather primroses in Parson's Meadow. He asked if our sisters--that was you, Dora, with Annie thrown into the bargain--thought of going on the river this afternoon." "He might be an inch or two taller, I don't suppose he is above five feet six or seven," suggested Annie, maliciously recalling a detail in the description of Dora's future husband, that be he who or what he might, he should certainly not be under six feet in height. Dora, who was herself considerably below the middle size, would never yield her freedom to a man who had to admit a lower scale of inches. "And his hair might be a little less--chestnut, shall we say, Dora?" put in Rose with exasperating sprightliness, referring to a former well-known prejudice of Dora's against "_Judas-tinted hair_." "Would you call his nose Roman or Grecian?" asked May naively, of a very nondescript feature. "And he has so little to say for himself," recommenced Annie, "though when he does speak there is no great fault to be found with what he says; still it would be dreadfully dull and tiresome to have to do all the speaking for a silent partner."