"We're the girl who works in the sweetshop and who never wants to touch chocolates again. We're the sort of girl who's been turned loose too early at dances and studio-parties and theatricals and so forth. The girl who's come in for too much excitement and flattery and love-making. Yes! For in spite of all my natural disadvantages (tuck in that bit of hair for me, will you?) and in spite of not being quite a fool—I've been made too much of, by men. The Monties and so forth. Here's where I pay for it. I and the girls like me. We can't ever take a real live interest in men again!"
"But——!" objected Gwenna, seeing a mental image of Leslie as she had been at that dance, whirling and flushed and radiant. "You seem to like——"
"'The chase, not the quarry,'" quoted Leslie. "For when I've brought down my bird, what happens?—He doesn't amuse me any more! It's like having sweets to eat and such a cold that one can't taste 'em."
"But—that's such a pity!"
"D'you suppose I don't know that?" retorted Miss Long. "D'you suppose I don't wish to Heaven that I could be 'in Love' with somebody? I can't though. I see through men. And I don't see as much in them as there is in myself. They can't boss me, or take me out of myself, or surprise me into admiring them. Why can't they, dash them? they can't even say anything that I can't think of, quicker, first!" complained the girl with many admirers, resentfully. "And that's a fatal thing to any woman's happiness. Remember, there's no fun for a woman in just being adored!"
The girl in love, kicking her small brown shoe against the pebbles of the garden path, sighed that she wished that she could try "being adored." Just for a change.
"Ah, but you, Taffy, you're lucky. You're so fresh, so eager. You're as much in love with that aviator's job as you are with anything else about him. You're as much amused by 'ordinary things' as any other girl is amused by getting a young man. As for what you feel about the young man himself, well!—I suppose that's a tune played half a yard to the right of the keyboard of an ordinary girl's capacity. You're keen for Life; you've got what men call 'a thirst you couldn't buy.' Wish I were like that!"
"Well, but it's so easy to be," argued Gwenna, "when you do meet some one so wonderful——"
"It's not so easy to see 'wonder,' let me tell you. It's a gift. I've had it; lost it; spoilt it," mourned the elder girl. "To you everything's thrilling: their blessed airships—the men in them—the Air itself. All miracles to you! Everything's an Adventure. So would Marriage be——"
"Oh, I don't—don't ever think of that. Being always with a person! Oh, it would be too wonderful—— I shouldn't expect—Even to be a little liked, if he once told me so, would be enough," whispered the little Welsh girl, so softly that her chum did not catch it.