He had come again, twice, in July, in August. Each time her mother had said, "Are you sure you want him to come again? You know you weren't very happy the last time." And she had answered, "I know I'm going to be this time." "You see," she said, "when he _isn't_ there you remember, and when he _is_ there he makes you forget." "Forget what?" "What it used to feel like." Mamma had smiled a funny, contented smile. Mamma was different. Her face had left off being reproachful and disapproving. It had got back the tender, adorable look it used to have when you were little. She hated Maurice Jourdain, yet you felt that in some queer way she loved you because of him. You loved her more because of Maurice Jourdain. The engagement happened suddenly at the end of August. You knew it would happen some day; but you thought of it as happening to-morrow or the day after rather than to-day. At three o'clock you started for a walk, never knowing how you might come back, and at five you found yourself sitting at tea in the orchard, safe. He would slouch along beside you, for miles, morosely. You thought of his mind swinging off by itself, shining where you couldn't see it. You broke loose from him to run tearing along the road, to jump water-courses, to climb trees and grin down at him through the branches. Then he would wake up from his sulking. Sometimes he would be pleased and sometimes he wouldn't. The engagement happened just after he had not been pleased at all. She could still hear his voice saying "What do you _do_ it for?" and her own answering. "You must do _something_." "You needn't dance jigs on the parapets of bridges." They slid through the gap into the fields. In the narrow path he stopped suddenly and turned. "How can a child like _you_ care for a man like _me_?" Mocking her sing-song. He stooped and kissed her. She shut her eyes so as not to see the puffiness. "Will you marry me, Mary?" VII. After the engagement, the quarrel. It lasted all the way up the schoolhouse lane. "I _do_ care for you, I do, really." "You don't know what you're talking about. You may care for me as a child cares. You don't care as a woman does. No woman who cared for a man would write the letters you do. I ask you to tell me about yourself--what you're feeling and thinking--and you send me some ghastly screed about Spinoza or Kant. Do you suppose any man wants to hear what his sweetheart thinks about Space and Time and the Ding-an-sich?" "You used to like it." "I don't like it now. No woman would wear those horrible clothes if she cared for a man and wanted him to care for her. She wouldn't cut her hair off." "How was I to know you'd mind so awfully? And how do you know what women do or don't do?" "Has it never occurred to you that I might know more women than you know men? That I might have women friends?" "I don't think I've thought about it very much."