ying to
make up my mind whether it would be better to ask you to wait here ten
minutes while I went up and made myself a little more presentable.... I
mean, whether you'd rather have me fit to look at, or have me like this
and not be bored by waiting. It's all one to me, you see, because even
if I did come down again presentable, you'd know--well, that I wasn't
that way naturally."

Whereupon he laughed out again, told her that a ten-minute wait would
bore him horribly, and that if she didn't mind, he much preferred her
natural.

"All right," she said, and went on with the conversation where she had
interrupted it.

"Why, I'm nobody much to get acquainted with," she said. "Mother's the
interesting one--mother and Portia. Mother's quite a person. She's Naomi
Rutledge Stanton, you know."

"I know I ought to know," Rodney said, and her quick appreciative smile
over his candor rewarded him for not having pretended.

"Oh," she said, "mother's written two or three books, and lots of
magazine articles, about women--women's rights and suffrage, and all
that. She's been--well, sort of a leader ever since she graduated from
college, back in--just think!--1870, when most girls used to
have--accomplishments--'French, music, and washing extra,' you know."

She said it all with a quite adorable seriousness and his gravity
matched hers when he replied:

"I would like to meet her very much. Feminism's a subject I'm blankly
ignorant about."

"I don't believe," she said thoughtfully, "that I'd call it feminism in
talking to mother about it, if I were you. Mother's a suffragist,
but"--there came another wave of faint color along with her
smile--"but--well, she's awfully respectable, you know."

She didn't seem to mind his laughing out at that, though she didn't join
him.

"What about the other interesting member of the family," he asked
presently, "your sister? Which is she, a suffragist or a feminist?"

"I suppose," she said, "you'll call Portia a feminist. Anyway, she
smokes cigarettes. Oh, can't I get you some? I forgot!"

He had a case of his own in his pocket, he said, and got one out now
and lighted it.

"Why," she went on, "Portia hasn't time to talk about it much. You see,
she's a business woman. She's a house decorator. I don't mean painting
and paper-hanging. She tells you what kind of furniture to buy, and then
sells it to you. Portia's terribly clever and awfully independent."

"All right," he said. "That br