"I haven't any!" said Mercedes frankly. "Not even a small gold band in the perspective?" I said. She looked down at her ringless hands: at the heap of fragrant linen lying in her lap. "This is to be part of my trousseau," she answered, indirectly, "part of what you call a 'Hope Chest.' All girls of my class sew a great deal and lay it all away until they marry. And, after all, I am not like my New York cousins, for where they say 'perhaps--when I get tired of playing,' I say, 'someday, when I meet the right man.' And so, you see, I am not like my Mother's people either--not quite. For they say, 'someday when my parents are satisfied--and let us hope it will be soon!'" I didn't wonder that Bill--that the men found her charming. The mixture of innocence and sophistication, the innate and the acquired worldliness was really delicious. "Do you talk to many people like this?" I asked curiously. "Of course not," she answered, wide-eyed. "I know of no one who would understand. There are times," she admitted, with a little sigh, "When I really do not understand myself." At the luncheon table I found myself looking at Mercedes, half as if she were a stranger, half as if she were an old friend. "I envy you and Bill, Mavis," she said, once, when Fong had left the room, "you have so much to make you happy. He's a very lucky man." I smiled. It was not a subject on which I wished to be interrogated. "And you," she went on, "are a lucky girl. He's awfully fine, that husband of yours." She played for a moment with her tea-spoon, and looked at me, rather pathetically. "I like the way American men are with their wives," she said, "I wish I could have met a Billy--" I might have responded that, in a few months' time, my husband would be legally free to take an interest in such remarks, but I refrained. "You must have met a number of men, in two years," I said. "Not Billies," she answered firmly, "awfully young they were, and--" she paused. Fong came in just then, and the conversation took a more discreet turn. After luncheon, siesta-ing in the two big swings down among the palms, I brought up the subject again. "So, after all," I said, "the 'right man' must be an American, Mercedes?" I had not calculated on the effect of my idle words. A vivid scarlet spread to the roots of the black hair. "On the boat," she answered, "we talked, your Bill and I--and since then, also. And I have learned a little of the reverence for women that your fine men have: a little of the way they guard and protect them--not by bars and bolts and commands, but by love and chivalry and thoughtfulness. I have seen that too, in my Father, a little. But, after all, my Father married Mother, and so, it is different with him. And he has never talked to me as he would to the daughter, perhaps, of an American wife--" I thought of my own Father and knew a swift pang of pity, for this rather rudderless little craft.