mused Dunham aloud.

"_You_ want to know, too, do you?" mocked his friend. "I'll tell
you what: processions of young men so long that they are an hour
getting by a given point. That's what's passing in every girl's mind
--when she's thinking. It's perfectly right. Processsions of young
girls are similarly passing in our stately and spacious intellects.
It's the chief business of the youth of one sex to think of the youth
of the other sex."

"Oh, yes, I know," assented Dunham; "and I believe in it, too--"

"Of course you do, you wicked wretch, you abandoned Lovelace, you
bruiser of ladies' hearts! You hope the procession is composed
entirely of yourself. What would the divine Hibbard say to your
goings-on?"

"Oh, don't, Staniford! It isn't fair," pleaded Dunham, with the
flattered laugh which the best of men give when falsely attainted
of gallantry. "I was wondering whether she was feeling homesick, or
strange, or--"

"I will go below and ask her," said Staniford. "I know she will tell
me the exact truth. They always do. Or if you will take a guess of
mine instead of her word for it, I will hazard the surmise that she
is not at all homesick. What has a pretty young girl to regret in such
a life as she has left? It's the most arid and joyless existence under
the sun. She has never known anything like society. In the country
with us, the social side must always have been somewhat paralyzed,
but there are monumental evidences of pleasures in other days that are