“You are not in love with him yourself?” she said, smilingly.
The girl made a quick, impatient gesture.
“I am speaking seriously,” she said. “You are several years younger than I am, and you don’t know what you are doing. Don’t let your father—don’t let anyone—persuade you to bind yourself to a man you don’t know, whose life has been so vitally different from your own as to render the possibility of sympathy between you very slight.”
Miss Lavington looked at her rather coldly.
“You are interesting yourself unnecessarily,” she said; “I loved him not so many years ago—it cannot be possible that so short a time would change us completely.”
The Beauty leaned her head back with sudden wearied look on her face. “A few years at our time of life makes all the difference in the world,” she said, earnestly. “What pleased and interested and fascinated us at eighteen might very possibly disappoint and disgust us at twenty or twenty-two. I do not mean to preach,” she said, smiling deprecatingly and turning to the rest, “but you know as well as I what an influence this college life has on us, and how hard it is to go back to former conditions. If we get stronger here we also get less adaptable. We are all affected by the earnestness and the culture and advancement of the life we lead here for four years, whether we will or no, and it is very hard to go back!”
They were all looking at her in amazement. The Beauty was not much given to that sort of thing. She stopped abruptly as if herself aware of the sensation she was creating, and laughed rather constrainedly.
“Don’t marry your handsome officer unless you are in love with him!” she said insistingly still to the girl beside her. “Don’t mistake the childish affection you felt for him for something deeper. You have your whole life before you—don’t spoil it by precipitation or a false generosity or a reckless passion!” There was an anxious, troubled look in her eyes.
The girl still stretched out on the tiger-skin glanced up again at The Beauty. “I seem to have started a subject in which you are deeply interested,” she said gayly to her. “And one in which you have had enormous experience too. Do you know you have an almost uncanny way of fascinating every man who comes near you. It’s a sure thing. None of the rest of us have a chance. I believe you could marry half a dozen or so at any time that you would take the trouble to say ‘yes’!”
The girl addressed looked openly amused—“Please take a few off your list,” she said. But the other refused to notice her remark and ran on in her light way.