got open wide and I saw what Mr. Willie had been trying to tell me,
which was that Whythe was probably taking practical consolation and was
not ignorant of the fact that my Father was not a poor man.

At the thought something got into my backbone and I sat up. I had been
fooling myself and didn't know it. I don't mean I had believed all the
thrilly love things Whythe had been saying. They came natural to him
and he might have said them to some other girl if not to me, but I had
not dreamed he had any thought of an advantageous alliance, as Billy
calls the thing his mother is hoping his sister will make, or that any
one could associate such a thought with me. It didn't seem possible,
and I don't believe Whythe is that sort. Still, men are queer ducks,
Jess says, and one never can tell what is in the back of their brain
from the words of their mouth, and if Whythe was imagining I had any
value outside of my own self I would like to find it out. How I was
going to find out I did not know, and when I said my prayers I started
to pray that a rattling good way would turn up, but I remembered it
wasn't exactly a thing to pray about and that watching might be better.

I had had a grand time being in love. Every day there was some new
evidence of how nice a beau is, and though the other boys didn't let
Whythe have it all his own way, as they called it, and we had a jolly
time together and I danced and rode and picnicked and pleasured with
all of them, still, it was understood that Whythe was my steady and
they gave him right much chance. It had been loads of fun having a
steady, and I knew now how excited Mazie, one of our maids at home,
must have felt the day she became engaged to hers, who was the milkman.
But I had somehow thought that nobody but girls of Mazie's sort had
steadies, and I had wished I could be a maid for a few weeks just to
find out how it would feel to possess some one and be possessed by him.