fe?"

"I want to wait till I'm twenty-one," she said.

It meant nothing to her, this date; but Maurice, accepting it as an
actual pledge of surrender, could only rail against her
unreasonableness.

"Good heavens! What for? You are without exception the most amazing
creature. Twenty-one! Why twenty-one? Why not fifty-one? Most of all,
why not now?"

"I can't. Not now. Not when I've just left home. I should feel a sneak.
Don't ask me to, Maurice. If you love me, as you say you do, you'll
wait a little while quite happy."

"But don't you want to give yourself to me?"

"I do, and then again I don't. Sometimes I think I will, and then
sometimes I think I don't want to give myself to any man."

"You don't love me."

"Yes, I do. I do. Only I hate men. I always have. I can't explain more
than what I've told you. If you can't understand, you can't. It's
because you don't know girls."

"Don't know girls," he repeated, staggered by the assertion. "Of course
I understand your point of view, but I think it's stupid and irrational
and dangerous--yes--dangerous.... Don't know girls? I wish I didn't."

"You don't," Jenny persisted.

"My dear child, I know girls too well. I know their wretched stammering
temperaments, their inability to face facts, their lust for sentiment,
their fondness for going half-way and turning back."

"I wish you wouldn't keep on walking up and down. It makes me want to
giggle. And when I laugh, you get angry."

"Laugh! It is a laughing matter to you. To me it's something so serious,
so sacred, that laughter no longer exists."

Jenny thought for a moment.

"I believe," she began, "I should laugh whatever happened. I don't
believe anything would stop my laughing."

Just then, away downstairs, the double knock of a telegraph boy was
heard, too far away to shake the nerves of Jenny and Maurice, but still
sufficiently a reminder of another life outside their own to interrupt
the argument.

"I wonder if that's for me," said Maurice.

"You'd better go down and see, if you think it is."

"Wait a minute. Old Mother Wadman may answer the door."

Again, far below, they heard the summons of humanity.

"Damn Mrs. Wadman! I wish she wouldn't go fooling out in the
afternoon."

"Why don't you go down, Maurice? He'll go away in a minute."

Once more, very sharply, the herald demanded an entrance for events and
emotions independent of their love, and Maurice unwillingly departed to
admit them.