"I haven't seen him around anywhere," went on Olivia. "Is he
here now?"

"He's in Chicago--in charge of his father's office there. He
may stay all winter."

"No, there's no hurry," went on Olivia. "Besides, you ought
to meet other men. It isn't a good idea for a girl to marry the
man she's been brought up with before she's had a chance to get
acquainted with other men." Olivia drew this maxim from
experience--she had been engaged to a school-days lover when she
went away to Battle Field to college; she broke it off when,
going home on vacation, she saw him again from the point of wider
view.

But Pauline scorned this theory; if Olivia had confessed the
broken engagement she would have thought her shallow and
untrustworthy. She was confident, with inexperience's sublime
incapacity for self-doubt, that in all the wide world there was
only one man whom she could have loved or could love.

"Oh, I shan't change," she said in a tone that warned her
cousin against discussion.

"At any rate," replied Olivia, "a little experience would do
you no harm." She suddenly sat up in bed. "A splendid idea!"
she exclaimed. "Why not come to Battle Field with me?"

"I'd like it," said Pauline, always eager for self-improvement
and roused by Olivia's stories of her college experiences. "But