"Do not suffer so," said Helen with an assumption of great indifference. "I don’t care to hear it." "Yes, I predict that you will be delighted to listen to it when it is told to you," said Rutledge confidently. "And it will be beyond doubt. But you are too young to hear such things yet. Be patient. You’ll get older if you live long enough." It fretted Helen to be told that she was young, as she was told a dozen times a day—not that she disliked her youth, but because of the suggestion that she was not free to do as she pleased; and her eyes began to flash at Rutledge’s taunt and her mind to form a suitable expression of resentment—when that gentleman walked away from her smiling at her petulant anger. Evans Rutledge had more interest in Helen’s words about her sister than he showed in his manner or conversation. He had not told Elise what his heart had told him for many days past, though she did not need spoken words to know. He, manlike, thought that he was keeping this knowledge of his supreme affection for her a secret in his own soul, to be delivered as a startling and effective surprise when an impressive and strategic opportunity should come to tell her of it. She, womanlike, read him as easily as a college professor is supposed to read Greek, and concerned herself chiefly with feigning ignorance of his interest in her. Elise’s true attitude toward Rutledge was a sort of neutrality. She was neither for him nor against him. She was attracted by everything she saw or knew of him, and looked upon him with that more than passing interest which every woman has for a man who has asked or will ask her to be his wife. On the other hand she was decided she could not accept Rutledge. She had but crossed the threshold of her unfettered young womanhood, and her natural and healthy zest in its pleasures overcame any natural impulse to choose a mate. Added to this were the possibilities held out in her romantic imagination as the increasing newspaper prophecies concerning her father induced day-dreams of court-like scenes and princely suitors when she should be the young lady of the White House, the most exalted maiden in great America, with the prerogative of a crown princess. A temporary prerogative surely, but well-nigh irresistible when combined with the compelling charm of American womanhood, that by right of genius assumes the high positions for which nature has endowed the gentlewomen of this republic, and by right of fine adaptability and inborn queenliness establishes and fortifies them, as if born to the purple, in the social high places of older civilizations.