"I hate girls in the abstract--they giggle and whisper behind their hands and make mouths; but there is one girl who is different." He tried to be very significant at the moment. She ignored his clumsy beginning of a compliment. "All the girls who giggle should marry the men who 'crack jokes'--that's my advice." "'Pears like our serious conversation is straggling out into vituperation." "Whose fault is it?" "Please don't force me to say it was not my fault. I'm like Lincoln--I joke to hide my sorrows." "Don't be irreverent." Through all this youthful give and take the boy and girl were studying each other minutely, and the phrases that read so baldly came from their lips with so much music, so much of hidden meaning (at least with displayed suggestion), that each was tingling with the revelation of it. The words of youth are slight in content; it is the accompanying tone that carries to the heart. She recovered first. "Now let's stop this school-boy chatter--" "You mean school-girl chatter." "Both. Your mother is in a very serious predicament. We must help her." He became quite serious. "I wish you would advise me. You know so much more about the whole subject than I do. I'm eager to get to work on the books. I suppose it is too much to expect that they will come up to-day?" "They might. I'll go and inquire." "No indeed, let me go. Am I not an inmate here?" He disappeared into the house, leaving her to muse on his face. He began to interest her, this passionate, self-willed, moody youth. She perceived in him the soul of the conqueror. His swift change of temper, his union of sport-loving boy and ambitious man made him as interesting as a play. "He'll make his way," she decided, using the vague terms of prophecy into which a girl falls when regarding the future of a young man. It's all so delightfully mysterious, this path of the youth who makes his way upward to success. A shout announced his return, and looking up she perceived him bearing down upon her with an armful of books. "Here they are!" he exulted. "Red ones, blue ones, brown ones--which shall we begin on?" "Blue--that's my color." "Agreed! Blue it is." He dumped them all down on the wide, swinging couch and fell to turning them over. "Dark blue or light blue?" "Dark blue." He picked up a fat volume. "_Mysterious Psychic Forces._ Know this tome?" "Oh yes, indeed! It's wonderfully interesting." "I choose it! This color scheme simplifies things. Now, here's another--_The Dual Personality_. How's that?" "Um! Well--pretty good." "_Dual Personality_ to the rear. Here's a brown book--_Metaphysical Phenomena_." "That's a good one, too." "I'm sorry they didn't bind it in blue--and here's a measly, yellow, paper-bound book in some foreign language--Italian, I guess, author, Morselli." "Oh, that's a book I want to read. Let me take it?" "Do you read Italian?" "After a fashion." "Then I engage you at once to translate that book to me. What is it all about?"