?" Ludlow asked.

"Why?"

"She's rather romantic."

"Oh, I thought all girls were romantic."

"Yes? You're not."

"What makes you think so?" asked the girl. "I'm a great deal more
romantic than is good for me. Don't you like romantic people? I do!"

"I don't believe I do," said Ludlow. "They're rather apt to make
trouble. I don't mean Miss Maybough. She'll probably take it out in
madly impossible art. Can she draw?"

Cornelia did not like to say what she thought of Charmian's drawing,
exactly. She said, "Well, I don't know."

Ludlow hastened to say, "I oughtn't to have asked that about your
friend."

"We're both in the Preparatory, you know," Cornelia explained. "I think
Charmian has a great deal of imagination."

"Well, that's a good thing, if it doesn't go too far. Fortunately it
can't, in the Preparatory."

At her door Cornelia did not know whether to ask him in, as she would
have done in Pymantoning; she ended by not even offering him her hand;
but he took it all the same, as if he had expected her to offer it.

XXII.

Cornelia found herself in her room without knowing how she got there,
or how long she had been there, when the man-voiced Irish girl came up
and said something to her. She did not understand at first; then she
made out that there was a gentleman asking for her in the parlor; and
with a glance at her face in the glass, she ran down stairs. She knew
it was Ludlow, and that he had thought of something he wanted to say,
and had come back. It must be something very important; it might be an
invitation to go with him somewhere; she wondered if they would have a
chaperone.

In the vague light of the long parlor, where a single burner was turned
half up, because it was not yet dark outside, a figure rose from one of
the sofas and came toward her with one hand extended in gay and even
jocose greeting. It was the figure of a young man, with a high
forehead, and with nothing to obstruct the view of the Shakespearian
dome it mounted into, except a modest growth of hair above either ear.
He was light upon his feet, and he advanced with a rhythmical step.
Cornelia tried to make believe that she did not know who it was; she
recoiled, but her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth, and she could
not gainsay him when he demanded joyfully, "Why, Nie! Why, Nelie! Don't
you remember me? Dickerson, J. B., with Gates & Clarkson, art goods?
Pymantoning? Days of yore, generally? Oh, pshaw, now!"