“Why, no.” Mrs. Corner’s voice showed surprise.
“I have thought so.” Miss Helen was the speaker. “You have just heard what Paul said. He is no unobservant person, and is not a suspicious one, yet I think he suspects that Nan has been touched by a romantic fancy, and he wanted to let us understand something of what we might look for, as well as to give us a clear knowledge of how matters were with Marc Wells.”
“Oh, Helen, the poor little girl!”
“My dear Mary, Nan is eighteen or nearly so. She is an intensely romantic, imaginative girl, and you may well believe she has her day-dreams as all girls of her age have.”
“Oh, but she would have come to me.”
“Did you go to your mother or any one else, at her age, with all your dreams?”
“Oh, Helen, why, I suppose not. How careless I have been. I should never have allowed her to go off that way to listen to him playing the violin. I ought to have known better, but she seemed such a child and it gave her so much pleasure. What folly in me not to realize that he was just the kind of person to attract a girl like Nan, a young, good-looking artist, musical, and with poetical fancies. I can see just how it happened, now it is too late.”
“Not too late; we can scarcely say that of a girl’s first little whimsy.”
“I suppose I have been blinded by other thoughts for Nan. One is prone to believe in what one most desires.”
Nan did not understand this speech. Next she heard her Aunt Helen say, “Heretofore I have no doubt she has had visions of some hero of an unreal world, some creature of imagination, some Sir Galahad, and has woven her fancies about him. That is what all girls do, and then comes the next step when they fix their thoughts upon some human being who is probably not in the least like their ideal, but whom imagination clothes in all the attractive qualities. This being may have shown himself to possess one such quality and that is enough for a vivid fancy like Nan’s. She invests him with all the rest.”