"Do you know what you are, Alicia?" I stood over her, puffing and chattering against time, "You are an old-fashioned girl, that’s what you are—with emotions and—and all sorts of curious traits, when you ought to be discussing Freud and complexes and the single standard and the right of woman—" the right of woman, I had almost said, to motherhood irrespective of marriage, upon which I had heard a fashionable young woman descant only that morning in the shop, apropos of a book she was buying on the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. But I paused in time. "And all sorts of things," I trailed off lamely. "Yes," she murmured, a faint sad smile wavering on her lips. "I’ll do that next time. I’ll deliver a lecture to Jimmie some evening on the OEdipus complex—or why it’s inadvisable to marry your own grandmother." Clearly Alicia is no stranger to the patter of the time. But what a glorious, natural creature she is! Her touch of satire after her tempest of emotion ravished me as perhaps nothing else. How adorable she was in all her moods! "Do it now, Alicia," I cried. "Now—I must go up and wash my face," she murmured. I couldn’t bear to let her go. "Where—where is Randolph to-night?" I clutched at her presence for another instant. "I don’t know," and with a sudden swift movement she glided out of the room. If only she knew how bewitching she is! But perhaps she is better ignorant. One thing is certain. She has answered my question. She is not in love with Randolph. Dimly I perceive a faint cohesiveness to the swimming lines of the picture. For some reason that she knows best, that seemed good to her, she yielded to the boy’s importunities. In some way the mother in her is involved. How little, after all, I know of my eldest nephew! Alicia doubtless knows more—much more. But this is the query that rises before me like a black pillar in the roadway: Can that splendid girl be deliberately planning to sacrifice herself for some real or fancied good to the boy—hoping the while that by the time his dangers are past, he might tire of her, and release her plighted word? But suppose he shouldn’t tire—as indeed how could he? Can I risk her happiness in that manner—her happiness which means to me a thousand times more than my own? My own happiness—useless to think of that new! Whatever Alicia did or didn’t betray, it was patently obvious that I am simply Uncle Ranny—as ever was. For one instant of excitement I was Randolph Byrd—but only for that. Ah, well, no use to dwell upon that bitterness now.