"Aunt Alice is so sensible," Pauline explained a few weeks later, "she talks to me a great deal; she's only a few years older than I am. She has shown me all her things for the baby. Mamma didn't think she ought ... you know how mothers are. They're in the bureau drawer in the best room. I'll show them to you some time; Alice won't mind." Alice didn't mind, it appeared, so it must have been shyness that led us to select the afternoon when the married women were away, and though I cannot forgive the conditions which led us so surreptitiously to touch the fringe of the great experience, I own still to some tenderness for the two girls with their heads together that bright hot afternoon, over the bureau drawer in Mrs. Allingham's best room. Pauline showed me a little sacque which she had crocheted. "Mother thought I was too young, but Alice said I might." "You must have liked to, awfully," I envied. "That's one of the nice things about having children, I should think"--Pauline fingered a hemstitched slip--"you can make things for them." "Which would you rather have, girls or boys?" I hazarded. "Oh, girls; you can always dress them so prettily." "But boys ... they can do so many things when they grow up." I felt rather strongly on that point. "Alice says"--Pauline folded the little frock--"that she's so glad to have it she doesn't care which it is." Something, perhaps an echo of my mother's experience, pricked in me. "They aren't always as glad as that." "I suppose not. Alice is having this one because she wants it." We looked at one another. We would have liked to have spoken further, to have defined ourselves, despoiled ourselves of tenderness, nobilities, but around the whole subject lay the blank expanse of our ignorance. We locked the drawer again and went out and played croquet. And that was how we stood toward our normal destiny that summer when Pauline was wondering if Henry Mills meant to propose to her, and I was wondering how much longer I could keep Tommy Bettersworth from proposing to me. I managed to stave it off until the end of September. On the twenty-second of that month there was a picnic at Willesden Lake. There were ten couples of us, and Flora Haines, who was wanted to count even with a young man who was to join us at the lake, a stranger to most of us, nephew to one of the wealthiest farmers in the township. We had always wished there might have been young people at the Garrett farm, and there was some talk of this nephew, who was to come on a visit, being adopted. Some of our brothers had made his acquaintance, and Pauline, who had met him at Montecito, had warranted him as "interesting." I believe Flora Haines was invited to pair with him because every girl felt that Flora would be eminently safe to trust her own young man to in the event of Helmeth Garrett proving more worth while.