“Oh, I say, you—why, hang it all, Jane, if you turn out to be an old maid I’ll—I swear I’ll not believe there’s a God or anything. It would be monstrous—inhuman.”
“Sometimes we can’t help it,” said she.
“It’s darned hard for me to think of you as a grown woman, but it’s even harder to conceive of you as an old maid.”
“You’re getting on in years yourself, old boy,” said she tauntingly. “Aren’t you afraid of becoming a crusty old bachelor?”
He did not answer. Apparently he had not heard her. He was deep in thought. After a long silence he spoke.
“What sort of a chap is Lansing, Jane?”
She started, and for a moment her eyes were fixed intently on his half-averted face. There was an odd, startled expression in them.
“He is very nice,” she answered.
“So everybody says. He struck me as an uncommonly decent, high-minded fellow. Knows a lot more to-day, of course, than he’ll know when he gets a little older. Just out of medical college, isn’t he?”
“He was overseas in 1917,” she replied, a trace of warmth in her voice. “He had been an interne for more than a year when he enlisted. He’s young, of course—but we are all young once, aren’t we? He is considered a very able—”