justice of life. Generations of acquiescence were in the slender
figure before him; and he realized that the completeness of her
surrender to Fate must have softened her destiny. Both girls were
victims of the changing fashion in women, of an age that moved not in a
stream, but in a whirlpool.

"I admire you," he said in a caressing voice, "more than I admire any
one else in the world."

She had been gazing into the fire, and as she turned slowly in answer to
his words, it seemed to him that the blue of a summer sky shone on him
from beneath the tremulous shadow of her eyelashes.

"The trouble," she replied, with an appealing glance, "is that I don't
know how to be common. There isn't any hope of a girl's being popular if
she doesn't know how to be common. I would be if I could," she confessed
plaintively, "but I haven't the faintest idea how to begin."

"I hope you'll never learn," he insisted. In awakening his sympathy she
had awakened also a deep-rooted protective instinct. He felt that he
longed to guard and defend her, as a brother of course, and if this
newer and tenderer sentiment was the result of feminine calculation, he
was too chivalrous or too inexperienced to perceive it. What he
perceived was simply that this lovely girl, whom he had known from
infancy, had opened her heart and taken him into her confidence. To
admit that she was not a success in her small social world, proved her,
he felt, to be both frank and courageous.

"Of course they don't call their way common," she pursued, with what
seemed to him the most touching candour. "Their word for it is 'pep'."
She pronounced the vulgar syllable as if she abhorred it. "That is what
I haven't got, and that's why I have never been a real success in
anything except church work. Even in the Red Cross it was 'pep' that
counted most, and that was the reason they never sent me to Europe.
Mother tried to make me into the kind of girl that men admired when she
was young; but the type has gone out of fashion to-day just as much as
crinolines or a small waist. If I were clever I suppose I could make
myself over and begin to jump about and imitate the sort of animation I
never had; but I'm not really clever, for I've tried and I can't do it.
It only makes me feel silly to pretend to be what I am not."

Her confession struck him, while he listened to it, as the sweetest and
most womanly one he had ever heard.

"I cannot imagine your pretending," he answered, and