treated the aunt who has been mother and father and all things else to
her, but I can't help laughing at the way Twickenham Town has taken the
engagement.

As for Whythe--I have wished for Billy a dozen times of late, for only
Billy could see what a scream it is, the shock to Whythe's vanity that
Elizabeth's beau is proving. I can't speak of it to any one else, and
keeping it to myself is a great strain. At first he seemed dazed with
unbelief, and then he became scorny and sniffy and shruggy and smiley,
and though he says little about his successor, whom he hasn't seen yet,
his manner indicates that as a substitute for himself he considers him
an insult.

Last night at the gate he talked to me about it for a while, and then
he asked me when I was going to tell him I would marry him, and why was
it I would not engage myself to him and take him out of his miserable
state of uncertainty and make him the happiest man in the world, and
why-- Oh, my granny! he spieled it off so beautifully and his eyes
helped so wonderfully, also the moon, which was half out and half in,
that I stayed a little longer at the gate than I should, perhaps, and
let him say things he shouldn't, but his fluency was so enjoyable I
couldn't get away. After a while, however, when he had run down a
little, I told him I didn't think it would be respectful to what might
have been if I engaged myself to him, and that sixteen was too young to
be engaged, and then, too, it wasn't positively certain that a certain
young person was going to marry another young person just because she
was at present engaged to him. At which he got perfectly furious and
said he would not marry that certain person if she was the only woman
left on earth; that she had treated him as no lady should treat a
gentleman, and that she was vain and mercenary and ambitious, and he
was mortified to think he had ever imagined he had loved so shallow and
weak and changeable a girl, and--

"But you did love her, didn't you?" I got up on the gate-post, swung
my feet down, and put my hands in my lap and out of reach, the post not
being big enough for two. "Everybody says you were frightfully in love
with her and you didn't think she was shallow and weak and mercenary
until you had the break, and maybe you may change your mind back again
about her some day, and then where would I be?" I put my chin in my
hands and my elbows in my lap and looked down at him, and he looked so
hurt and s