age in taking a girl for herself regardless of her surroundings.
So few men would be willing to face the ridicule and the criticism, and
all the social difficulties." She nodded encouragingly. "Go in and
win! You can count on my friendship--for I'm in love with her myself."

She left him standing dazedly, looking up and down the street as if it
were some strange and pine-beset highway in a foreign land.

After taking a few steps she returned to the gates and called him: "I
forgot to ask do you want me to regard what you've told me as
confidential? I was thinking of telling Martha and Hugo, and it
occurred to me that you might not like it."

"Please don't say anything about it," said he with panicky eagerness.
"You see--nothing's settled yet."

"Oh, she'll accept you."

"But I haven't even asked her," pleaded Hull.

"Oh--all right--as you please."

When she was safely within doors she dropped to a chair and burst out
laughing. It was part of Jane's passion for the sense of triumph over
the male sex to felt that she had made a "perfect jumping jack of a
fool" of David Hull. "And I rather think," said she to herself, "that
he'll soon be back where he belongs." This with a glance at the tall
heels of the slippers on the good-looking feet she was thrusting out
for her own inspection. "How absurd for him to imagine he could do
anything unconventional. Is there any coward anywhere so cowardly as
an American conventional man? No wonder I hate to think of marrying
one of them. But--I suppose I'll have to do it some day. What's a
woman to do? She's GOT to marry."

So pleased with herself was she that she behaved with unusual
forbearance toward Martha whose conduct of late had been most trying.
Not Martha's sometimes peevish, sometimes plaintive criticisms of her;
these she did not mind. But Martha's way of ordering her own life.
Jane, moving about in the world with a good mind eager to improve, had
got a horror of a woman's going to pieces--and that was what Martha was
doing.

"I'm losing my looks rapidly," was her constant complaint. As she had
just passed thirty there was, in Jane's opinion, not the smallest
excuse for this. The remedy, the preventive, was obvious--diet and
exercise. But Martha, being lazy and self-indulgent and not
imaginative enough to foresee to what a pass a few years more of
lounging and stuffing would bring her, regarded exercise as unladylike
and dieting as unhealthful. She w