“I—I gueth I live on Chethnut Thtreet,” she called as the door slammed and shut her in. His sister amicably offered him half the plush bag to carry, and opened a running criticism of the afternoon. “Did you ever see anybody act like that Frannie Leach? She’s awfully rough. Miss Dorothy spoke to her twice—wasn’t that dreadful? What made you dance all the time with Cissy Weston? She’s an awful baby—a regular ’fraid-cat! We girls tease her just as easy—do you like her?” “She’s the prettiest one there!” he said. His sister stared at him. “Why, Dick Pendleton, she is not! She’s so little—she’s not half so pretty as Agnes, or—or lots of the girls. She’s such a baby. She puts her finger in her mouth if anybody says anything at all. If you ask her a single thing she does like this: ‘I don’t know, I don’t know!’” He smiled scornfully. Did he not know how she did it? Had he not seen that adorable finger, those appealing eyes? “And she can’t talk plain! She lisps—truly she does!” Heavens! Was ever a girl so thick-headed as that sister of his! Brains, technical knowledge, experience of the world, these he had never looked to find in her; but perceptions, feminine intuitions—were they lacking, too? Poor deluded sex! What shall emancipation, what shall higher education profit you that cannot even now discern what charm has entangled your brothers and husbands? “She puts her finger in her mouth! She can’t talk plain!” Alas, my sisters, it was Helen’s finger that toppled over Troy, and Diane de Poitiers stammered! He listened calmly to his sister’s account of his infatuation and its causelessness. “Why, she’s a nice little girl,” said his aunt, smiling, “but, really, she can’t be called exactly pretty. There is something rather attractive about her eyes.” In this wise may Mark Antony’s aunt have dismissed the very Serpent of old Nile herself! “I should like,” he said to his mother the next day, “to go and see her.” “Well, you can go with me to-morrow, perhaps, when I call on Mrs. Weston,” she assented. “What? Why, of course not! Men don’t go calling in pumps. Your best shoes will do. Are you crazy? A straw hat in February! You will wear your middy cap. Now don’t argue the matter, Richard, or you can’t go at all.” Seated opposite her on a hassock, their mothers chatting across the room, his assurance withered away. There was nothing whatever to say, and he said it, adequately perhaps, but with a sense of deepening embarrassment. She took refuge behind her hair, and they stared uncomfortably at each other. [Illustration: “_Seated opposite her on a hassock._”] “And he has never condescended to have anything to do with little girls before, so we are much impressed.” Oh, why did not the hassock yawn beneath him and swallow him up! To discuss him as if he were a piece of furniture! Laugh away! The crackling of thorns under a pot....