The dove-coloured eyes flickered angrily. "I had a terribly good time," she began. "Besides, it's the proper thing--girls don't come out at twenty and marry off and let that be the end of it. You really have a much better time now if you wait until you are twenty-five, and then you somehow have learned how to be a girl for an indefinite period. As for the finishing school in America--well, we had a wonderful sorority." "I've met college women who were clear-headed persons deserving the best and usually attaining it--but I've never taken a microscope to the sort of women playing the game from the froth end. I'm wondering what your ideas were." "You visited me--you met my friends--my chaperons--you wrote me each day." "I was in love and busy making my fortune. I was as shy as a backwoods product--you know that--and afraid you would be carried off by someone else before I could come up to the sum your father demanded of me. I have nothing but a hazy idea as to a great many girls of all sorts and sizes--and mostly you." "Well, we had wonderful lectures and things; and I had a wonderful crush on some of the younger teachers--that is a great deal of fun." "Crushes?" "You must have crushes unless you're a nobody--and there's nothing so much a lark. You select your crush and then you rush her. I had a darling teacher, she is doing war work in Paris now. She was a doll. I adored her the moment I saw her and I sent her presents and left flowers in her room, orchids on Sundays, until she made me stop. One day a whole lot of us who had been rushing her clipped off locks of our hair and fastened them in little gauze bags and we strung a doll clothes line across her room and pinned the little bags on it and left a note for her saying: 'Your scalp line!'" "What did that amount to?" "Oh, it was fun. And I had another crush right after that one. Then some of the classes were interesting. I liked psychology best of all because you could fake the answers and cram for exams more easily. Math. and history require facts. There was one perfectly thrilling experience with fish. You know fish distinguish colours, one from the other, and are guided by colour sense rather than a sense of smell. We had red sticks and green sticks and blue sticks in a tank of fish, and for days we put the fish food on the green sticks and the fish would swim right over to get it, and then we put it on the red sticks and they still swam over to the green sticks and waited round--so it was recognizing colour and not the food. And a lot of things like that." Steve laughed. "I hope the fish wised up in time." Beatrice looked at him disapprovingly. "If you had gone to college it might have made a great difference," she said. "Possibly," he admitted; "but I'll let the rest of the boys wait on the fishes. Did you go to domestic science this morning?"