“Oh, Bartley!” she exclaimed, “I feel like a child. I surprise myself as much as I do you; for I thought I had got very old, and I didn't suppose I should ever let myself go in this way. But there is something about this that lets me be as silly as I like. It's somehow as if I were a great deal more alone when I'm with you than when I'm by myself! How does it make you feel?” “Good!” he answered, and that satisfied her better than if he had entered into those subtleties which she had tried to express: it was more like a man. He had his arm about her again, and she put down her hand on his to press it closer against her heart. “Of course,” she explained, recurring to his surprise at her frolic mood, “I don't expect you to be silly because I am.” “No,” he assented; “but how can I help it?” “Oh, I don't mean for the time being; I mean generally speaking. I mean that I care for you because I know you know a great deal more than I do, and because I respect you. I know that everybody expects you to be something great, and I do, too.” Bartley did not deny the justness of her opinions concerning himself, or the reasonableness of the general expectation, though he probably could not see the relation of these cold abstractions to the pleasure of sitting there with a pretty girl in that way. But he said nothing. “Do you know,” she went on, turning her face prettily around toward him, but holding it a little way off, to secure attention as impersonal as might be under the circumstances, “what pleased me more than anything else you ever said to me?” “No,” answered Bartley. “Something you got out of me when you were trying to make me tell you the difference between you and the other Equity girls?” She laughed, in glad defiance of her own consciousness. “Well, I _was_ trying to make you compliment me; I'm not going to deny it. But I must say I got my come-uppance: you didn't say a thing I cared for. But you did afterward. Don't you remember?” “No. When?” She hesitated a moment. “When you told me that my influence had--had--made you better, you know--” “Oh!” said Bartley. “That! Well,” he added, carelessly, “it's every word true. Didn't you believe it?”