"And if you were a man I suppose you would feel the same way about it."
"Oh, more so!" she cried. "The more I thought of a girl the surer I'd want to be that she need never face that rainy day unprotected."
She stooped to pick a tiny yellow star from a clump of broom growing alongside the track, and they walked on in silence a moment. Then he said, with an amused side-glance at her:
"You can't imagine how funny it seems to hear such common-sense, practical 'side talks on matrimony' from an eighteen-year-old girl like you. I feel as if I'd had a scolding from my grandmother, and that I'll have to own up that I did it, but I'm sorry and I'll never do it again."
"Did what?" queried Mary in surprise.
"Spent everything as fast as I made it. Had money to burn and burnt it. I don't ask any better salary than I've been receiving for several years. Of course, when I go in by myself, that'll be another matter. But I'll have to own up; out of it all, I've saved practically nothing. I haven't spent it in riotous living, and it doesn't seem that I've been particularly extravagant, but it's gone. It just slipped through my fingers."
"Oh, well, you," began Mary. "That's different."
"In what way is it different?" he persisted, when she did not go on.
"Well, if a man doesn't mind getting wet himself it's nobody's business if he takes chances. It's the man who expects to—to have some one else to protect—who ought to be ready for the possible storms."
"But what makes you think that I'll always go it alone?" insisted Phil. "That I'll never have any one to—protect? That's what you seem to insinuate."