No wonder! Paul was the great beau of the town, and she the girl least of all like a belle. And, remembering his plain consciousness of this contrast, almost ludicrously expressed in his surprise that she should try to detain him with her for even a few minutes, she shivered as she wept. She hated herself for begging of him; she hated herself for having run out of the house to try for the thousandth time to be one of a “crowd” that didn’t want her; she hated herself for “hanging around them,” laughing and pretending that she was one of them, when anybody could see she wasn’t. She hated herself for having something wrong about her, and for not being able to find out what it was; she hated herself, and she hated everything and everybody—except her father. . . . At dinner that evening he reproached her for being pale. “I don’t believe you take enough exercise,” he suggested. “Yes, I do. I took a long walk this afternoon. I walked four or five miles.” “Did you?” He smiled under his heavy old-fashioned, gray lambrequin of a moustache, and his eyeglasses showed a glint of humorous light. “That doesn’t sound as if you went with a _girl_ companion, Elsie! Four or five miles, was it?” “I went alone,” she said, occupied with her plate. His humorous manifestations vanished and he looked somewhat concerned. “Is that so? It might have been jollier the other way, perhaps. I sometimes think I monopolize you too much, young woman. For instance, you oughtn’t to spend all your evenings with me. You ought to keep up your contemporary friendships more than you do, I’m afraid. Why don’t you ask the girls and boys here to play with you sometimes?” “I don’t want them.” “Would you like to give a dance—or anything?” “No, Papa.” He sighed. “I’m afraid your young friends bore you, Elsie.” “No,” she said. “It isn’t that exactly. I just——” She left the sentence unfinished. “You just don’t take much interest in ’em,” he laughed. “Well—maybe.” Still occupied with the food before her, though her being occupied with it meant no hearty consumption of it, she seemed to admit the charge. “Something like that.” “It shouldn’t be so,” he said. “From the little I see of ’em I shouldn’t spot any of ’em for a lofty intellect precisely, but young people of that sort in a moderate-sized city like this usually do seem to older people just a pack of incomprehensible gigglers and gabblers. I suppose you never hear much from ’em except personalities and pretty slim jokes, and it may get tiresome for a girl as solid on the Napoleonic Period as you are.” He paused to chuckle. “I don’t suppose you hear much discussion of Madame de Rémusat among ’em, do you?” “No.” “What I’m getting at,” he went on;—“you oughtn’t to think too much about intellectual fodder or be bored with people your own age because they can’t offer it.” At that she glanced wanly at him across the table. “I’m not, Papa. They don’t bore me.”