"She must make her mother very unhappy." "Yeast makes dough uncomfortable, I suppose," he admitted. "She's an unscrupulous truth-teller," Miss Graham said, and repeated some of the impertinently accurate things that Frederica, sitting in her ugly little living-room, with the Japanese fans on the walls, and yellow "Votes for Women" pennons over the doors, had flung at Mrs. Holmes. "Her grandmother said the 'women of to-day cheapened themselves'; to which she replied that 'the women of yesterday were dear at any price'!" "She told me she had merely been truthful," Mr. Weston said. "Justifying herself on the ground of Truth is Fred's form of repentance. But the girl _suffers_, Cousin Eliza!" "She'll have to suffer a good deal before she'll amount to anything," Miss Eliza said, dryly; "I wanted to shake her! Arthur, if you had any missionary spirit, you would marry her." "But Cousin Mary says she is 'not a young woman who is calculated'--" They both laughed. "Nonsense! If she gets a master, she'll make him happy. A good-natured boy won't do. The gray mare would be the better horse. Marry her and beat her." "Maitland will have to do the beating," he said. But he could not evade her. "Don't be a fool. Take her! I know you want her." "I do," he confessed. "But the little matter of her not wanting me seems to be an obstacle." Miss Eliza, her old eagle head silhouetted against the dazzle of the lake, meditated; then she said, "Is she engaged to Mr. Maitland?" "No, but she's going to be. Besides, dear lady, I am forty-seven and she is twenty-six. Youth calls to Youth! Please don't suggest that she might prefer to be an 'old man's darling.'" "You're not an old man. But the average young man--if he fell in love with her--would be under her thumb." "Why do you say 'if'? Maitland has fallen in love with her, head over heels! He can't stop talking about her brains for five minutes at a time!" Miss Eliza gave him a keen look. "Well, perhaps human nature has changed since my time. Then, a boy didn't fall in love with a girl's brains, though a grown man sometimes did. Cleverness in a girl is like playfulness in a kitten; it amuses a middle-aged man. The next thing he knows, he's in love!" "Amuses!" Arthur Weston broke in, cynically; "to 'amuse' a middle-aged man doesn't seem a very satisfying occupation for a girl. Don't you think she'd rather have a boy's ridiculously solemn devotion?" "But don't I tell you?--Love comes next! And I know you are in love, because you are so foolish. Arthur, I'm ashamed of you! Do have some spunk. Get her! Get her! I don't believe she's in love with that boy."