"What sort of men has she been associated with?" asked Dunham.

"Well, I'm not quite prepared to say. I take it that it isn't exactly
the hobbledehoy sort. She has probably looked high,--as far up as the
clerk in the store. He has taken her to drive in a buggy Saturday
afternoons, when he put on his ready-made suit,--and looked very well
in it, too; and they've been at picnics together. Or may be, as she's
in the school-teaching line, she's taken some high-browed, hollow-
cheeked high-school principal for her ideal. Or it is possible that
she has never had attention from any one. That is apt to happen to
self-respectful girls in rural communities, and their beauty doesn't
save them. Fellows, as they call themselves, like girls that have what
they call go, that make up to them. Lurella doesn't seem of that kind;
and I should not be surprised if you were the first gentleman who had
ever offered her his arm. I wonder what she thought of you. She's
acquainted by sight with the ordinary summer boarder of North America;
they penetrate everywhere, now; but I doubt if she's talked with them
much, if at all. She must be ignorant of our world beyond anything we
can imagine."

"But how do you account for her being so well dressed?"

"Oh, that's instinct. You find it everywhere. In every little
village there is some girl who knows how to out-preen all the others.
I wonder," added Staniford, in a more deeply musing tone, "if she
kept from laughing at you out of good feeling, or if she was merely
overawed by your splendor."

"She didn't laugh," Dunham answered, "because she saw that it would
have added to my annoyance. My splendor had nothing to do with it."