"If I liked all the friends of every one I know, I should never have any time to do anything else."
"You forget that I happen to be your brother," I said, but I might have known better than to make such a remark, for she seemed to think it was amusing.
"Sometimes you are quite delicious," she returned, and I began to feel that we were as far off a plain understanding as we had ever been.
"Look here, Nina, you are beginning to give yourself airs, and it is time some one told you," I began desperately. "You will be known as a nice girl gone wrong; you were nice once, and now you talk as if you know a lot of people and try to make out you are about twice as old as you really are. It won't do, it really won't; what's the good of pretending things, it's such a waste of time?"
She looked away from me when I had finished, and I had not the vaguest idea how she would reply, but at any rate she did not laugh.
"You are really serious for once," she said half questioningly.
"I often try to be serious, only no one ever suspects it," I answered, unable to keep myself out of it.
"But you are always one-sided."
I very nearly said that I had only spoken for her good, but managed to stop myself, because no one ever believes you when you say it. Besides, it would have annoyed her, so I was silent.
"You see you have not got much older, and I have. I couldn't bounce a ball up and down two hundred and thirteen times now."