"Oh, well, if I am expected to, I suppose I must," Graham sighed. "But
just the same I hate to do whatever everybody does just because
everybody does it. But if it's the custom--well, it's the custom,
that's all. But it's mighty hard on one with so many other nice girls
around."

There was a quizzical light in his long gray eyes that affected
Ernestine so profoundly that she gazed into his eyes over long, became
conscious of what she was doing, dropped her own eyes away, and
flushed.

"Little Leo--the boy poet you remember last night," she rattled on in
a patent attempt to escape from her confusion. "He's madly in love
with Paula, too. I've heard Aaron Hancock chaffing him about some
sonnet cycle, and it isn't difficult to guess the inspiration. And
Terrence--the Irishman, you know--he's mildly in love with her. They
can't help it, you see; and can you blame them?"

"She surely deserves it all," Graham murmured, although vaguely hurt
in that the addle-pated, alphabet-obsessed, epicurean anarchist of an
Irishman who gloried in being a loafer and a pensioner should even
mildly be in love with the Little Lady. "She is most deserving of all
men's admiration," he continued smoothly. "From the little I've seen
of her she's quite remarkable and most charming."

"She's my half-sister," Ernestine vouchsafed, "although you wouldn't
dream a drop of the same blood ran in our veins. She's so different.
She's different from all the Destens, from any girl I ever knew--
though she isn't exactly a girl. She's thirty-eight, you know--"