"Are you ever going to get married? You are twenty-four."
Caroline was laughing again; but it was not the same spirit of mirth that had been called into life by the possible and probable advent of Mr. "Shifty" Sullivan.
"You ought to get married," declared Mrs. Cathewe. "Think of the dinners and teas I should give, following the announcement."
"It is almost worth the risk," mockingly. Caroline arose and walked over to the grate and sat down in the Morris chair. She took up the tongs and stirred the maple log. The spurt of flame discovered a face almost as beautiful as it was interesting and amiable. Her principal claim to beauty, however, lay in her eyes, which were large and brown, with a glister of gold in the rim of that part of the iris which immediately surrounded the pupil. With these eyes she was fascinating; even her dearest friends admitted this; and she was without caprices, which is a rare trait in a beautiful woman. She was also as independent as the Declaration which her mother's grandfather signed a hundred and some odd years before. She came naturally into the spirit, her father being a retired army officer, now the financial mainstay of St. Paul's, of which the Reverend Richard Allen had recently been duly appointed rector.
It is propitious to observe at once that the general possessed an unreliable liver and a battered shin which always ached with rheumatism during rainy weather. Only two persons dared to cross him on stormy days—his daughter and his son. The son was completing his final year at Harvard in the double capacity of so-and-so on the 'varsity crew and some-place-or-other on the eleven, and felt the importance of the luster which he was adding to the historic family name. But this story in nowise concerns him; rather the adventures of Mr. Sullivan, the pugilist, and the rector of St. Paul.
"Mollycoddle," mused Caroline, replacing the tongs.
"Oh, your father's judgment is not infallible."
"It is where courage is concerned," retorted Caroline.
"Well, what's a mollycoddle, anyway?" demanded Mrs. Cathewe, forgetting for the time being her own imminent troubles.
"Does Webster define it? I do not recall. But at any rate the accepted meaning of the word is a person without a backbone, a human being with rubber vertebræ, as daddy expresses it."