“Well,” returned Miss Rittingway, “it is only fair to Alice to say that she has said ‘no’ to several young men who had not the pleasure of being acquainted with her father. And she certainly means ‘no’ when she says ‘no.’ Sometimes it appears that she almost means ‘yes’ when she says ‘yes.’ I suppose it makes a good deal of difference whether in the series of young men she is to meet a girl encounters the worst ones first or last. Alice told me yesterday, with her adorable chuckle, that I must admit there was a steady improvement in the quality of the young men she was being engaged to. I told her I could stand the succession, but that if she wanted to be my friend she must have them one at a time. ‘But, my dear Margaret,’ she said, ‘can’t you see that it often happens—’ ‘Yes, I know. You would die of an unengaged interval, and of course you can’t discharge one until you are securely committed to the other.’ ‘How can I?’ she demanded. ‘How do I know that I shall have to discharge one until I _am_ securely committed to the other? And then the other one isn’t always where I can get at him to tell him. That is how it happens, Margaret dear.’ What can you do with such a girl?” “What does her father say?” “He _doesn’t_ say any more. Once he had theories of an old-fashioned formality. He had a good talk with the first man she was engaged to. After that he got dazed. Last fall he told her not to send any one else to him until she was quite sure. This amused her immensely. ‘It is so hard to be sure!’ she says, as if she had taken up being sure as a study.” “It may be,” I said, “that she will get through all right. One of the cleverest and most happily married women I know was engaged six times. You never can tell. It is not fair to expect that the personal responsibility of choice which we have placed upon the American girl will not sometimes be attended with aberrations. There may be much of entertainment in being successively engaged. Yet I have no doubt but that the habit is degenerate.” Miss Rittingway looked uncommonly serious for a moment. “We all know,” she said, “that the most dangerous period in a girl’s life is that immediately following a broken engagement. The periods following Alice’s broken engagements have always been so much enlivened by the excitements of new engagements that she has escaped a certain form of danger, whatever different danger she may have tumbled into.” “And whatever may have been the danger of the men she has thrown over.” “Yes, it would be fair to think of them. They say that Mortie Weldworth took it very hard. But do you know, I have an idea that Alice lets them down so delicately and prettily that most of them don’t get savage about it.” “A polite executioner is a great mitigation,” I observed. “Really, you know, Alice is the acme of graceful perversity. I think that if I were a man I should rather be rejected by Alice than accepted by some others.”