such a nice, reasonable, really beautiful plan for you, and given you a
tip about it, and then I sat and watched you in that thoroughgoing way
of yours, kicking it all to bits. But somehow, when I see you all by
yourself, this way, it changes things. I get to thinking that perhaps my
plan was silly after all--anyhow, it was silly to make it. The plan was,
of course, to marry you off to Hermione Woodruff."

He turned this over in his deliberate way, during the process of
blowing two or three smoke rings, began gradually to grin, and said at
last, "That was some plan, little sister. How do you think of things
like that? You ought to write romances for the magazines, that's what
you ought to do."

"I don't know," she objected. "If reasonableness counted for anything in
things like that, it was a pretty good plan. It would have to be
somebody like Hermione. You can't get on at all with young girls. As
long as you remember they're around, you're afraid to say anything
except milk and water out of a bottle that makes them furious, and then
if you forget whom you're talking to and begin thinking out loud,
developing some idea or other, you--simply paralyze them.

"Well, Hermione's sophisticated and clever, she's lived all over the
place; she isn't old yet, and she was a brick about that awful husband
of hers--never made any fuss--bluffed it out until he, luckily, died. Of
course she'll marry again, and I just thought, if you liked the idea, it
might as well be you."

"I don't know," said Rodney, "whether Mrs. Woodruff knows what she wants
or not, but I do. She wants a run for her money--a big house to live in
three months in the year, with a flock of servants and a fleet of