"Do as you please," her mother used to say, when doing as she pleased would involve less of mischief than of valuable experience, "and perhaps you'll learn to please to do sensibly." Again, her father would restrain her mother from interference--"Oh, let the girl alone. She's got to teach herself how to behave, and she can't begin a minute too young." This training had produced a self-reliant and self-governing Olivia. She wondered at the change in Pauline--Pauline, the light-hearted, the effervescent of laughter and life, now silent and almost somber. It was two weeks before she, not easily won to the confiding mood for all her frankness, let Olivia into her secret. Of course, it was at night; of course, they were in the same bed. And when Olivia had heard she came nearer to the truth about Dumont than had Pauline's mother. But, while she felt sure there was a way to cure Pauline, she knew that way was not the one which had been pursued. "They've only made her obstinate," she thought, as she, lying with hands clasped behind her head, watched Pauline, propped upon an elbow, staring with dreamful determination into the moonlight. "It'll come out all right," she said; her voice always suggested that she knew what she was talking about. "Your father'll give in sooner or later--if YOU don't change." "But he's so bitter against Jack," replied Pauline. "He won't listen to his side--to our side--of it." "Anyhow, what's the use of anticipating trouble? You wouldn't get married yet. And if he's worthwhile he'll wait." Pauline had been even gentler than her own judgment in painting her lover for her cousin's inspection. So, she could not explain to her why there was necessity for haste, could not confess her conviction that every month he lived away from her was a month of peril to him. "We want it settled," she said evasively. "I haven't seen him around anywhere," went on Olivia. "Is he here now?" "He's in Chicago--in charge of his father's office there. He may stay all winter." "No, there's no hurry," went on Olivia. "Besides, you ought to meet other men. It isn't a good idea for a girl to marry the man she's been brought up with before she's had a chance to get acquainted with other men." Olivia drew this maxim from experience--she had been engaged to a school-days lover when she went away to Battle Field to college; she broke it off when, going home on vacation, she saw him again from the point of wider view. But Pauline scorned this theory; if Olivia had confessed the broken engagement she would have thought her shallow and untrustworthy. She was confident, with inexperience's sublime incapacity for self-doubt, that in all the wide world there was only one man whom she could have loved or could love. "Oh, I shan't change," she said in a tone that warned her cousin against discussion.