Jenny never told her mother that half the attraction of boys' society nowadays lay in the delight of making fools of them. If she had told her Mrs. Raeburn might not have understood. Jenny was angry that her mother should suspect her of being fast. She was sure of her own remoteness from passionate temptation. She gloried in her security. She could not imagine herself in love, and laughed heartily at girls who did. She was engaged to sixteen boys in one year, to not one of whom was vouchsafed the light privilege of touching her cheeks. They presented her with cheap jewelry, which she never returned on the decease of affection, and scarcely wore during its short existence. It was put away in a cigar-box in a tangled heap of little petrified hearts. Mrs. Raeburn, however, who beheld in these despised youths a menace to her daughter's character, was never tired of dinning into her ears the tale of Edith's disaster. The more she scolded, the more she held a watch in her hand when Jenny came back from the theater, the more annoying was Jenny, the longer did she delay her evening home-comings. The fact that Bert and Edie had settled down into commonplace married life did not make her regard more kindly the circumstance-impelled conjunction. She reproduced in her mental view of the result something of her mother's emotion immediately before her own birth. Long ago Mrs. Raeburn had settled down into an unsatisfied contentment; long ago she had renounced extravagance of hope or thought, merely keeping a hold on laughter; but Jenny felt vaguely the waste of life, the waste of love, the waste of happiness which such a marriage as Edie's suggested. She could not have formulated her impressions. She had never been taught to co-ordinate ideas. Her mind was a garden planted with rare shrubs whose labels had been destroyed by a careless gardener, whose individual existence was lost in a maze of rank weeds. Could the Fates have given her a rich revenge for the waste of her intelligence, Jenny should have broken the heart of some prominent member of the London School Board, should have broken his heart and wrecked his soul, herself meanwhile blown on by fortunate gales to Elysium. May was often told of her sister's crusade, of the slain suitors too slow to race with Atalanta. "Men _are_ fools," Jenny proclaimed. "Did you see Fred to-night?" "Yes; he saw me home." "What did he say?" "Nothing much. I told him not to talk because he got on my nerves, and I wanted to think about my new costume for the spring." "Didn't he mind?" "I can't help his troubles. He asked if he might kiss me." "What did you say?" "I told him after the next turning, and every time we come to the next turning I told him the next, till we got to our gate. I said good night, and he said, 'What about my kiss?' I said, 'There's a cheek; you don't want much'; and he said, 'I give you a brooch last week, Jenny'; and I said, 'There's your brooch,' and I threw it down."