They envied her often when they had the very thing she wanted--or, at
least, she didn't have it. They enlarged on her popularity, and she
answered, "Oh yes, nice boys, most of them, but--"

She had always said, "_When_ I marry," not "_if_," and had said it much as
she said, "When I grow up." And, yes, she believed in fate: that everybody
who belonged to you would find you out; but--it was only hospitable to
meet them half-way! So her admirers found her in the beginning hopefully
interested, and in the end rather mournfully unconvinced. Her regret seemed
so genuinely on her own account as well as theirs that they usually carried
off a very kind feeling for her. She was equally open to enlistment in any
other proposed diversion. For Bessie lived in a constant state of great
expectation that something really nice would really happen to-morrow. There
was always something wrong to-day.

"It's not fair!" she complained to Guy Osbourne, when he came to tell her
good-by, all in the gray. "I'm positively discriminated against. If _I_
have an engagement, it's sure to rain! And now just when I'm beginning to
be a grown young lady, with a prospect _at last_ of a thoroughly good time,
a war has to break out!"

Her petulance was pretty. Guy laughed. "How disobliging!" he sympathized.
"And how modest!" he added--which the reader may disentangle; Bessie did
not. "_At last!_" he mocked her.

For Bessie Hall, whose community already moved in an orbit around her, and
whose parents had, according to a familiar phrase, an even more
circumscribed course around her little finger--for Bessie Hall to rail at
fate was deliciously absurd, delightfully feminine!