were there; and whenever you see him coming, your heart begins to dance."
"Well," I said, "that seems an attractive sketch. Why not choose a boy like that?"
"Because," she explained, "it seems as if nowadays none of the boys that one really likes is ever going to amount to much. At any rate, you must wait till your doddering old age before you can hope to be married—and what's the use then? He won't be interesting to me, and I won't be nice for him—then. But we'll just sit around in padded chairs, with ear-trumpets in our ears, and yell, 'Whadye say?' at each other; and wish it were bedtime."
"I don't quite understand the reason for this postponement."
"If," she said, "they are boys of your own age, and enjoy the books and music that you do, and are nice to dance with, why, then they think they are going to be poets or composers, and so they don't work, and they flunk out of school—and your mother asks you why you persist in playing around with 'that worthless fellow'—doesn't she, Oliver?"
"Yep!" said her brother, and grinned.
Dorothy, leaning across my knees, first pinched,
