"I'll bring him," said Henry valiantly. "I'm not going to see him calumniated, that's all." Then something struck his sense of humour and he chuckled. "It will be a new and valuable experience to him," he said, "to have to come clandestinely. Do him good!" I went upstairs then. It had been a fair day's work. But it's hard to count on a family. Mother sprained her ankle getting out of the car that night and was laid up for three days. I chafed at first. Henry might change his mind or one of the eleven get in some fine work. We declined everything that week, and I made some experiments with my hair and the aid of mother's maid. I wanted a sort of awfully feminine method--not sappy but not at all sophisticated. Toots Warrington is always waved and netted, and all the girls by that time had got earrings and were going round waved and netted too. I wanted to fix my hair like a girl who slips her hand into a man's coat pocket because she can't help it, and then tries to get it out, and can't because his hand has got hold of it. Then one night I got it. Henry had dropped in, and found mother with her foot up and the look of a dyspeptic martyr on her face, and father with a cold and a thermometer in his mouth. "I've come to take Kit to the movies," he announced calmly. "Far be it from me not to contribute to the entertainment of a young lady who is just out!" "Full of gerbs!" father grunted, referring to the movies of course, not me. But mother agreed. "Do take her out, Henry," she said. "She's been on my nerves all evening." So we went, and there was a girl in one of the pictures who had exactly the right hair arrangement. She had it loose and wavy about her face, and it blew about the way things do blow in the movies, and in the back it was a sort of soft wad. It shows the association of ideas that I found my hand in Henry's coat pocket, and he grabbed it like a lunatic. "You darling!" he said thickly. "Don't do that unless you mean it. I can't stand it." I had to be very cool on the way home in the motor or he would have kissed me. Mother and I went to a reception on the following Tuesday, and I wondered if mother noticed. She did. Coming home in the motor she turned and stared at me. "Thank heaven, Kit," she said, "you still look like a young girl. All at once Ellie and the others look like married women. Earrings! It's absurd. And such earrings! I am quite sure," she went on, eying me, "that some of them had been smoking. I got an unmistakable whiff of it when I was talking with Bessie Willing." Well, I had rinsed my mouth with mouth wash and dabbed my lips with cologne, so she got nothing from me. But I tasted like a drug store. I am not smoking now. I am not doing much of anything. I--but I'm coming to that.