sk all the plain girls he danced with, all the dull girls he
talked with! When I think what a good time I should have with him as a
plain girl, if I were not his sister, I lose all patience." She glanced
up in her father's face, with all the strange charm of features that had
no regular beauty; and then, as she had to do whenever she remembered
them, she asserted the grace which governed every movement and gesture
in her, and got as lightly to her feet as if she were a wind-bowed
flower tilting back to its perpendicular. Her father looked at her with
as fond a delight as a lover could have felt in her fascination. She
was, in fact, a youthful, feminine version of himself in her plainness;
though the grace was all her own. Her complexion was not the leathery
red of her father's, but a smooth and even white from cheek to throat.
She let her loose cloak fall to the chair behind her, and showed herself
tall and slim, with that odd visage of hers drooping from a perfect
neck. "Why," she said, "if we had all been horned cattle, he couldn't
have treated us better."

"Do you hear that, Matt?" asked the father, as his son came in, after a
methodical and deliberate bestowal of his outer garments below; his
method and his deliberation were part of the joke of him in the family.

"Complaining of me for making her walk home?" he asked in turn, with the
quiet which was another part of the joke. "I didn't suppose you'd give
me away, Louise."

"I didn't; I knew I only had to wait and you would give yourself away,"
said the girl.

"Did he make you walk home?" said the father. "That's the reason your
hands are so cold."

"They're not very cold--now; and if they were, I shouldn't mind it in
such a cause."

"What cause?"

"Oh the general shamefulness of disusing the feet God had given me. But
it was only three blocks, and I had my arctics." She moved a little away
toward the fire again and showed the arctics on the floor where she must
have been scuffling them off under her skirts. "Ugh! But it's cold!" She
now stretched a satin slipper in toward the fire.

"Yes, it's a cold night; but you seem to have got home alive, and I
don't think you'll be the worse for it now, if you go to bed at once,"
said her father.

"Is that a hint?" she asked, with a dreamy appreciation of the warmth
through the toe of her slipper.

"Not at all; we should be glad to have you sit up the whole night with
us."

"Ah, now I know you're hinting. Is it