Mr. Dill."

"I'm afraid so."

"Well----" She stood looking at him expectantly, but he said nothing
more. "Well, good-bye for the present, Mr. Dill," she said again, and,
turning, walked away with dignity. But a moment later she forgot all
about her skirt and scampered.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mrs. Dill, Noble's mother, talked of organizing a Young Men's Mothers'
Club against Julia, nevertheless she acknowledged that in one solitary
way Noble was being improved by the experience. His two previous attacks
of love (one at twelve, and the other at eighteen) had been incomparably
lighter, and the changes in him, noted at home, merely a slight general
irritability and a lack of domestic punctuality due to too much
punctuality elsewhere. But, when his Julia Atwater trouble came, the
very first symptom he manifested was a strange new effort to become
beautiful; his mother even discovered that he sometimes worked with
pumice stone upon the cigarette stains on his fingers.

The most curious thing about his condition was that for a long time he
took it for granted that his family did not know what was the matter
with him; and this shows as nothing else could the meekness and tact of
the Dills; for, excluding bad cooks and the dangerously insane, the
persons most disturbing to the serenity of households are young lovers.
But the world has had to accommodate itself to them because young lovers
cannot possibly accommodate themselves to the world. For the young lover
there is no general life of the species; for him the universe is a
delicate blush under a single bonnet. He has but an irritated perception
of every vital thing in nature except the vital thing under this bonnet;
all else is trivial intrusion. But whatever does concern the centrifugal
bonnet, whatever concerns it in the remotest--ah, _then_ he springs to
life! So Noble Dill sat through a Sunday dinner at home, seemingly
drugged to a torpor, while the family talk went on about him; but when
his father, in the course of some remarks upon politics, happened to
mention the name of the county-treasurer, Charles J. Patterson, Noble's
startled attention to the conversation was so conspicuous as to be
disconcerting. Mrs. Dill signalled with her head that comment should be
omitted, and Mr. Dill became, for the moment, one factor in a fairly
clear example of telepathic communication, for it is impossible to
believe that his wife's almost imperceptible gesture was what caused