"How very young you are!" Miss Wilson said, superior experience oozing out at every pore. Sally might have passed this by, but when it came to patting you on the cheek, she drew a line. "Tishy dear, do you mean to go on like that, when I'm a hundred and you are a hundred and five?" "Yes, dear. At least, I can't say. Anything may have happened by then." "What sort of thing? Come, Tishy, don't be enigmatical. For instance?" "You'll change your mind and be wiser--you'll see." Which might have been consecutive in another conversation. But it was insufferably patronizing in Laetitia to evade the centenarian forecast that should have come in naturally, and retreat into a vague abstraction, managing to make it appear (Sally couldn't say how or why) that her own general remarks about man, which meant nothing, were a formal proclamation of celibacy on her part. It is odd how little the mere wording of a conversation may convey, especially girl's conversation. What _is_ there in the above to warrant what came next from Sally? "If you mean Dr. Vereker, that's ridiculous." "I never mentioned his name, dear." "Of course you didn't; you couldn't have, and wouldn't have. But anybody could tell what you meant, just the same, by leaving your mouth open when you'd done speaking." We confess freely that we should not have known, but what are we? Why _should_ Laetitia's having left her lips slightly ajar, instead of closing them, have "meant Dr. Vereker"? But the fact is--to quote an expression of Sally's own--brain-waves were the rule and not the exception with her. And hypnotic suggestion raged as between her and Miss Laetitia Wilson, interrupting practice, and involving the performers in wide-ranging, irrelevant discussion. It was on a musical occasion at Ladbroke Grove Road that this conversation took place. Laetitia wasn't going to deny Dr. Vereker, evidently, or else there really was something very engrossing about her G string. Sally went on, while she dog's-eared her music, which was new, to get good turning-over advantages when it came to playing. "My medical adviser's not bad, taken as an aunt. I don't quite know what I should do without poor Prosy. But as for anything, of course that's absurd. Why, half the fun is that there _isn't_ anything!" Laetitia knew as well as possible that her young friend, once started, would develop the subject on her own lines without further help from her. She furnished her face with a faint expression of amused waiting, not strong enough to be indictable, but operative, and said never a word.