"Oh, about twenty-one. Why?"
"Well, I scarcely knew him before we went away, and he called me by my first name as pat as you may please, and I didn't like it. And when he rolled up the towelling he crooked his little finger in such an affected, genteel, Miss Prim sort of way that it made his big fat hands look ridiculous. I don't know exactly what it was about him that irritated me so, but I couldn't bear him. And yet it seemed that he was so near being nice, that he could be awfully likable if he wasn't so self-conscious and queer."
"He's all right," answered Jack. "Pink is a good-hearted fellow, with the best intentions in the world, but he's green. You see, he hasn't any sisters to call him down and make fun of his mannerisms and set him straight on his color schemes and such things. Now, a girl in his position could get her bearings by going the rounds of the Home Magazines and Ladies' Companions, reading all the Aunt Jenny Corners and columns of advice to anxious correspondents. But there are not so many fountains of information and inspiration for a young man."
"Now, there's your mission in life, Mary," spoke up Norman. "You are strong on giving advice and setting people straight. If you could only get some magazine to take you on for a column of that kind, you might accomplish a world of good. You could send marked copies to Pink, and it might be the making of him."
Norman expected his teasing remarks to meet with an amusing outburst, and was surprised when she pretended to take his suggestion seriously. Her eyes shone with the interest it awakened.
"Say! I'd like that," she answered emphatically. "I really would. I'd call it Uncle Jerry's Corner, and I'd certainly enjoy making up the letters myself so that I could have good spicy replies for my correspondents."
Norman, just in the act of drinking, almost choked on the laugh which seized him. "Excuse me," he spluttered, putting the glass down hastily, "but Mary in the rôle of Uncle Jerry is too funny. Why, Sis, you couldn't be a proper Uncle Jerry without chin whiskers. The editors wouldn't give such a column to anybody without them. A girl could never fill a position like that."
"Indeed she could," Mary protested. "I knew a girl at school who earned her entire spending money for a year, one vacation, by writing an Aunt Ruth's Column for the weekly paper in her home town. She was only eighteen, and the most harum-scarum creature you ever saw. She had been engaged four times, and once to two boys at the same time. And she used to lay down the law in her advice column like a Puritan forefather. Just scored the girls who flirted and accepted valuable presents from men, and who met clandestinely at friends' houses.
"Her letters were so good that several parents wrote to the paper congratulating them on that department. And all the time she was doing the very things which she preached against. She and Charlotte Tatwell were chums, and in all sorts of scrapes together. Charlotte's father used to mourn over her wild ways and try to keep her from running so much with Milly. He thought that Milly had such a bad influence over her. He hadn't the faintest idea that she wrote the Aunt Ruth advice, and twice, when it seemed particularly well aimed at Charlotte's faults, he made her sit down and listen while he read it aloud to the family. Charlotte thought it was such a good joke on her father that she never enlightened him till he'd repeated the performance several times. He wouldn't believe it at first, didn't think it possible that Milly could have written it, till Charlotte proved that she really had.
"If she could do that, I don't see why I couldn't write better advice to boys than a doddering old man who has only his recollections to draw on. I could criticize the faults that I see before me. Boys need to be shown themselves as they appear to the girls, and I'm not sure but I'll act on Norman's suggestion, and take it up as a side-line."