ell-booted foot up on the bottom rail.

Part 7

"And what are you doing here, young lady," he said, looking up at her
face, "wandering alone so far from home?"

"I like long walks," said Ann Veronica, looking down on him.

"Solitary walks?"

"That's the point of them. I think over all sorts of things."

"Problems?"

"Sometimes quite difficult problems."

"You're lucky to live in an age when you can do so. Your mother,
for instance, couldn't. She had to do her thinking at home--under
inspection."

She looked down on him thoughtfully, and he let his admiration of her
free young poise show in his face.

"I suppose things have changed?" she said.

"Never was such an age of transition."

She wondered what to. Mr. Ramage did not know. "Sufficient unto me is
the change thereof," he said, with all the effect of an epigram.

"I must confess," he said, "the New Woman and the New Girl intrigue me
profoundly. I am one of those people who are interested in women, more
interested than I am in anything else. I don't conceal it. And the
change, the change of attitude! The way all the old clingingness
has been thrown aside is amazing. And all the old--the old trick of
shrinking up like a snail at a touch. If you had lived twenty years ago
you would have been called a Young Person, and it would have been your
chief duty in life not to know, never to have heard of, and never to
understand."

"There's quite enough still," said Ann Veronica, smiling, "that one
doesn't understand."

"Quite. But your role would have been to go about saying, 'I beg your
pardon' in a reproving tone to things you understood quite well in your
heart and saw no harm in. That terrible Young Person! she's vanished.
Lost, stolen, or strayed, the Young Person!... I hope we may never
find her again."

He rejoiced over this emancipation. "While that lamb was about every man
of any spirit was regarded as a dangerous wolf. We wore invisible chains
and invisible blinkers. Now, you and I can gossip at a gate, and {}Honi
soit qui mal y pense. The change has given man one good thing he never
had before," he said. "Girl friends. And I am coming to believe the best
as well as the most beautiful friends a man can have are girl friends."

He paused, and went on, after a keen look at her:

"I had rather gossip to a really intelligent girl than to any man
alive."

"I suppose we ARE more free than we were?" said Ann Veronica, keeping
the question gene