“Well, I’m not as surprised to be the uncle of a peach,” he said, with renewed chuckling, “as I am to see you the aunt of one! I’m kind of surprised to have Jennie, here, turn out to be the mother of one, too. You certainly never showed any such style as that when you were young, Jennie! Why, there ain’t a girl in that whole bunch to hold a candle to her! She’s a two-hundred-carat blazer and makes the rest of ’em look like what you see on a ten-cent-store counter! You heard me yourselves: the very first thing I said was, ‘Who _is_ that wonderful girl?’ And I didn’t even know it was Sallie. I guess that shows!” Sallie’s mother laughed excitedly. “Oh, we’re used to it, George! She’s never gone a place these last three years she didn’t put it all over the other girls in two shakes of a lamb’s tail! The boys go crazy over her as soon as they see her, even the ones that are engaged to other girls, and a few that are married to the other girls, too! We’ve had some funny times, I tell you, George!” “I expect so!” he chuckled. “I guess you’re fixing for her to pick a good one, all right, Jennie!” “She don’t need me to do any fixing for her,” Sallie’s mother explained, gaily. “She’s got a mighty good head on her, and I guess she knows she can choose anything she decides she wants. Look at her now.” She laughed in loud triumph as she spoke, and pointed to the pavilion. Mrs. Cromwell’s eyes followed the direction of the pointing forefinger and saw a stationary nucleus among the swirl of dancers—a knot of young men gathered round a girl and engaged in obvious expostulation. The disagreement was so pronounced, in fact, as to resemble a dispute; for it involved more gesturing than is usually displayed in the mere arguments of members of the northern races;—“cutting in” to dance with this girl was apparently a serious matter. She was a laughing, slender creature, with hints of the glow of rubies in the corn-silk brown of her hair; and the apple-green thin silk of her sparse dancing dress was the right complement for her dramatic vividness. Brilliant eyed, her face alive with little ecstasies of merriment as the debaters grew more and more emphatic, she might well have made an observer think of “laughing April on the hills”—an April with July in her hair and a ring of solemn young fauns disputing over her. She did not allow their disagreement to reach a crisis, however, though the fauns were so earnest as to seem to threaten one;—she placed a slim hand upon the shoulder of her interrupted partner, whose arm had been all the while tentatively about her waist, and began to dance with him. But over her shoulder as she went, she flung a look and a word to the defeated, who dispersed thoughtfully, with the air of men not by any means abandoning their ambitions.