“Don’t you think young girls nearly all get like that sometimes?” Mildred suggested. “Perhaps somebody hurt her feelings at the last party she did go to.” She laughed reminiscently. “I remember when I was about her age I was terribly anxious to please that funny little Paul Thompson, who used to live next door. He danced with me twice at somebody’s birthday party, and I felt perfectly uplifted about it. Then I overheard him talking to another boy, not thinking I was near him. He said his mother had told him he must be polite to me or he wouldn’t have done it, and he certainly never would again, no matter what his mother said, because I’d walked all over his new pumps. It just crushed me, and I know I moped around the house for days afterward; but I wouldn’t tell you what was the matter. It’s the most terribly sensitive age we go through, Mamma, and I just _couldn’t_ have told you. Perhaps there’s been a Paul Thompson for Cornelia.” “No,” Mrs. Cromwell returned. “I’m sure there isn’t, and that nobody’s hurt her feelings. She came home from the last party she went to, a couple of months ago, in a perfect gale of high spirits; she’d had a glorious time. Then, a week or two later, when I spoke of arranging for her birthday, she got very moody—wouldn’t hear of any such thing; and she’s been so ever since. Your father’s getting cross about it and thinks we ought to do something.” “You don’t suppose—you don’t suppose she’s fallen in love? It does happen, you know, Mamma—even at fifteen and sixteen.” “No,” Mrs. Cromwell returned decidedly. “I’m certain it isn’t that. She’s sensible about the boys she knows, and she’s never shown the slightest sentimentality. I’ve thought over all those things, and it isn’t any of them. Nothing’s the matter with her health either; so there just isn’t any reason at all for a change in her. Yet she _has_ changed—completely. In the space of a few weeks—you might almost say a few days—instead of being the bright, romping, responsive girl she’s always been, she’s become so silent and remote you’d think the rest of her family were mere distant and rather inferior acquaintances. It’s mysterious and extremely uncomfortable. Your father thinks we ought to send her away to school where she’d have a complete change, and I’ve had some correspondence about it with Miss Remy of your old school. I think perhaps——” Mrs. Cromwell stopped speaking, her attention arrested by the sound of a door opening and closing. She listened for a moment, then whispered: “There! She’s just come in. See for yourself.” The two ladies were sitting in a room that opened upon the broad central hallway of the house, and their view of that part of the black-and-white marble-floored hall just beyond the open double doors was unimpeded. Here appeared in profile the subject of their discussion, a plump brunette demoiselle, rosy-cheeked and far from uncomely, but weightily preoccupied with her own thoughts.