As she considered the suggestion, reaching the point where Cousin Julia came in, the girl's heart smote her. Cousin Julia would be startled--yes, frightened. What a wretch she was deliberately to plan to cause her utterly gratuitous anxiety! And how practised, how _grounded_, in deceit she had grown, to turn thereto so readily for help out of difficulty! How very far she was getting from her class motto, "Per aspera ad astra"! And she recollected a word, strange hitherto to her, which Cousin Julia had used in the summer. She had mentioned her hope, as she had looked forward to the coming of the real Elsie Marley, that she shouldn't have, at sixteen, become _inveterate_ in the ways of the Pritchard family. Well, wasn't she fast becoming _inveterate_ in the ways of deceit? Wasn't she, perhaps, already inveterate? Truly, she must be perilously near it. And oh, wasn't this a far, far worse sort of _inveterateness_ than the Pritchard sort? And if Cousin Julia had dreaded that, how, pray, would she feel in regard to this? Rising suddenly, Elsie rushed into her own room as if she were running away from the visions she had conjured. As she made herself tidy for dinner, her desperation grasped at a third expedient, a middle way. Couldn't she get around the difficulty by preventing or forestalling the introduction of any doubtful topic into the conversation? During the time that would elapse between Mr. Graham's arrival and Cousin Julia's return--three-quarters of an hour at the longest, she supposed--she would keep him from bringing up any matter of resemblances, of big dimples, of madonnas, or sticky babies. She would monopolize the conversation, so far as she could, and direct it all the time. At the risk of utterly losing the good opinion of one of Cousin Julia's most valued friends, of appearing forward, conceited, tiresome, she would rattle on like the empty-headed society girl in certain modern plays. She would introduce utterly impersonal subjects, such as--at the moment she couldn't think of anything but prohibition, which would last about two minutes--and chatter foolishly and fast upon them, one after another. Then, if she exhausted them and all else failed, she would make such pointed and brazen references to her own singing that he would be obliged to ask her to sing--and once going, she could easily keep that up until Cousin Julia came to the rescue. And she certainly wouldn't sing "Elsie Marley" nor anything that would in any way remind Mr. Graham of it. Either she would shock that elegant gentleman's taste with the ugliest of ragtime, or she would inflict him with a succession of the operatic selections she had taken up with Madame Valentini. The latter choice would probably, upon Miss Pritchard's arrival, serve to bring up the unhappy matter of her abandoning the stage for music, but that would be a minor evil.