"

"What will you do with him?"

"Marry him, of course. That is what he will be there for, won't it? I
expect to marry some one some time. Marriage makes a woman's life fuller
and freer, though not necessarily happier. I want to get all into my life
that I can."

"I wonder whom you will marry," mused Phebe, where she sat curled up on
the sofa. "I wonder what he could be like. Gerald, how I should like to
see you in love!"

"You won't see it," replied Gerald. "No one will ever see it. It
wouldn't be my way to make a display of the insanity, supposing, that
is, that I have it."

"I hope at least you will show it to _him_."

"Not overmuch even to _him_. He'll have to take it on faith. I haven't
the faintest intention of informing any one of the state of my affections
a dozen times a day. Once for all ought to be sufficient with the
declaration, as it is with the marriage vow."

Phebe puckered up her forehead. "Ah, how different we are! If I am ever
engaged to any one I shall want to keep telling him all the time how much
I love him, for fear he wouldn't guess it."

"You will bore him to death then."

"I suppose I shall," replied Phebe, dejectedly. "I don't suppose any
one living wants to be loved so much as I would want to love him. I
couldn't be cool and deliberate and wise at loving as you would be. I
should have to do it with my whole heart and just give myself up to it
for good and all."

"That's the story-book way of loving," said Gerald. "I don't believe in
it for real life. Blind adoration doesn't do either the lover or the
loved any good. There should be sense in one's emotions as well as in
one's opinions."

Phebe was silent a moment or two. "You are so self-possessed, and so
self-controlled, Gerald," she said at last. "It must be very nice to have
one's self so perfectly in command as you have. And yet I don't know. I
think it would be rather nice too to find one's self suddenly under the
power of some one a great deal better and stronger and wiser than one's
self, who compelled one to love him, not because one would, but just
because one could not help it."

The girls were alone in the sitting-room, Mrs. Lane having gone out to a
neighbor's, taking Olly with her, and Miss Lydia not having yet appeared
for her usual hour downstairs. It was a few days after the picnic, and
was one of those suddenly cool August evenings that sometimes drop down
so unexpectedly upon the summer heat, and a wood-fire l