The older girl turned and gazed, half blankly, at the dark-eyed face in that mist of loosened hair. "Yes," she drawled, for all that her hands and hunched-up knees were bookless. "Yes, I'm reading. I'm having a little squint at this puzzle-scroll they call Life." She made a peremptory gesture and Barbara crept in beside her. "I--may I turn off the light?" she asked. Miriam snapped the button. "I couldn't sleep," Barbara began presently, in a quaintly small voice. "And I--I wanted--Miriam, I've acted so like an unschooled, half-grown girl to-day that it has perplexed and worried me! From the moment when I first recognized him and became so--tangled up--I've just chattered and chattered. You don't think I'm utterly frivolous and unstable, do you?" "Haven't you always been famed for your poise?" came back the uncompromising voice she knew so well. "Are you--you aren't laughing at me, are you?" she hesitated. "Because I don't think I am in the mood to be laughed at. And I have poise. I am not a child. But looking back now, I can't quite account for all my--shall I call it cordiality? Don't you believe, Miriam, that it was because I wanted to make up, a little, for the way I treated him when he was a boy?" "Maybe!" agreed Miriam, unenthusiastically. "Because I did treat him abominably," went on the drowsy voice. "And, do you know, all day, even when we seemed so--such good friends, I still felt as though he was on guard against any repetition of such a slight. I wouldn't want him to feel that way, but it was there just the same, even in the way he received the invitation to my party. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that there are men who--who'd almost charter a liner to come--if I'd invite them. It would have sounded conceited, but I wanted to _jolt_ him! And he just said he'd come if he could!" "He has his work," Miriam answered, and into her voice crept that wearied, indescribably hard note which the younger girl couldn't understand. "He has to work, and a lot of those others would be a lot more worth asking, if they had to work, too. I wish every man had to--work--hard; had to work until body and brain were numb with it!" Her voice slurred and she recovered it. "I don't know whether he remembers or not. Probably not! You've just had a unique experience for one of our kind, that's all. You've met a man!" Barbara raised herself upon one elbow. "You don't mean to infer, do you, Miriam," she reproved, "that Archie Wickersham or my other friends, or--or Garry, aren't men?" "Males!" snapped the other girl. "Just males! But"--and she seemed to be arguing with herself--"but Garry might have been, though--he might have been!" Barbara lay awake a long time, pondering.