l."

"That's mighty cruel, you know, when I feel as though I had known you
always."

He tried to throw feeling into this, but the time and place and her
vigorous strides over the ice did not encourage sentiment.

"You oughtn't to tell girls that you feel you have known them always. It
isn't complimentary. You ought to express sorrow that they are so
difficult to know and play the card that you hope by great humility and
perseverance one day to know them. That is the line I should take if I
were a man."

He laughed at this. There were undoubted fastnesses in her nature that
were not easily attainable. She seemed to him amazingly mature in
certain ways, and in others she was astonishingly childlike.

"They say you're a genius; that you're going to do wonderful things," he
said.

"Who says it?" asked Phil practically, but not without interest.

"Oh, my aunt says it; she says other people say it."

"Well, my aunts haven't said it," remarked Phil. "According to them my
only genius is for doing the wrong thing."

"We needn't any of us expect to be appreciated in our own families.
That's always the way. You read a lot, don't you?"

"I like to read; but you can read a lot without being a genius. Geniuses
don't have to read--they know it all without reading. So there's that."

"I'll wager you write, too;--confess now that you do!"

"Letters to my father when he's away from home--one every night. But he
isn't away very much."

"But stories and things like that. Yes; don't deny it: you mean to be a
writer! I'm sure you can succeed at that. Lots of women do; some of the
best writers are women. You will write novels like--like--George Eliot."

Phil laughed her derision of the idea.

"She knew a lot; more than I could ever know if I studied all my life.
But there's only one George Eliot; I'm hardly likely--just Phil Kirkwood
in Montgomery, Indiana,--to be number two."

The direction of the talk was grateful to her. It was pleasant to feel
the warmth of his interest in her new secret aims without having to
acknowledge them. It was flattering that he surmised the line of her
interests, and spoke of them so kindly and sympathetically.

"I try to do some reading all the time," he went on; "but a business man
hasn't much chance. Still, I usually keep something worth while on the
center table, and when I travel I carry some good book with me. I like
pictures, too, and music; and those things you miss in a town like
Mon