"I'm a kid, I tell you," she said aloud, throwing out her
justification to the whole world. "I am and I will be, I will be.
I'll play the fool and revel in it as long as I can--so there. Who
cares?" And she laughed once more, and ran her hand over her hair as
though waving all these thoughts away, and shut the windows and
turned out the lights and went upstairs to her bedroom. "I'm a
selfish, self-willed little devil, crazy about myself, thinking of
nothing but having a good time," she added inwardly. "I know it, all
of you, as well as you do, but give me time. Give me my head for a
bit. When I must begin to pay, I'll pay with all I've got."

But presently, all ready for bed, she put on a dressing gown and
left her room and padded along the passage in heelless slippers to
Martin's room. He might have been asleep all this time. How silly
not to have thought of that! She would wake him for one of their
talks. It seemed an age since they had sat on the hill together
among the young buds, and she had conjured up the high-reaching
buildings of New York against the blue sky, like a mirage.

She had begun to think again. Alice and Gilbert between them had set
her brain working--and she couldn't stop it. What if the time had
come already when she must pull herself together and face facts and
play what everybody called the game? Well, if it had, and she simply
couldn't hide behind youthfulness any longer, as Gilbert had said,
she would show that she could change her tune of "Who cares?" to "I
care" with the best of them! "I'm only a little over eighteen. I
don't know quite what it is, but I'm something more than pretty. I'm
still not much more than a flapper--an irritating, empty-headed,
fashionable-school-fed, undisciplined, sophisticated kid. I know all
about that as well as they do. I'm making no pretense to be anything