From the light bits of conversation that were wafted to me as I sat and read in the window-seat, I gathered that most of the women took Charlemagne's leap-year idea as a joke, but I knew that to Elizabeth and Anne the question presented itself seriously, and that each would settle it in her own way, and according to the tradition of her own time. For that education and environment had made the difference, I did not doubt. Had Elizabeth been born eighteen years earlier, when women were taught the mysteries of advance and retreat, that coquetry was their best weapon, and that man must always be the wooer, she might have felt all of Anne's shrinking from a revelation of herself; whereas had Anne been brought up in the later days when boys and girls mingle in close comradeship, when plays and books subtly analyze the state of woman as the pursuer and man as the pursued, she might have been as frank about her feelings as Elizabeth. Hence, I argued, they were both of them what their generation had made them, and I, who loved Anne, and adored her for her womanliness, was yet forced to admit the potency of Elizabeth's youth, and the charm of her complete surrender. After a time the men began to drift in, and I heard the multi-millionaire from the West inquiring for Elizabeth. He was a big, broad-shouldered fellow, sure of himself, but not unpleasantly so, and when he couldn't find the girl he wanted, he came over and talked to me. "Say," he began at once, "it's all tommyrot about this leap-year business. When I want a girl to do anything, I want to ask her. It makes me feel foolish to have to wait for her to come to me. I wish Dabney would cut it out." "But think what an opportunity for a girl to get what _she_ wants," I said. "They don't know what they want," he stated dogmatically. "The way to win a woman is to pick her up and put her on a horse and run away with her----" "Suppose she doesn't care to be run away with?" I asked. "Oh, she'd settle down to it," he said securely; "and besides that, I can't really imagine a nice girl asking a man to marry her." I thought of Elizabeth as she had stood with her hand on her heart and had hurled defiance at conventions. "Girls are hard to understand," I murmured. "Oh, I don't know," he contended. "If a man gets right down to primitive principles and keeps after her, he'll get her--and it makes me hot to think I am wasting valuable time trying to stick to Dabney's old rules, when I have to go back West again on Monday." I wanted to be sure, so I murmured, "Of course it's Elizabeth Ames?" "Who else?" he demanded. "Oh, I'm going to jump over the traces, Miss Sophie, and let her know I mean business. This thing of sitting around and letting her go off with another man--you know she's riding with Dabney this morning?" I nodded.