"If what?"
Now, however, Ernest dropped his serious tone. "If we were younger. Tell me, Kate, can you remember how you felt when you first realized that you weren't a child any more? I was thinking about myself the other day, and wondering why I feel so much older now than I did a year or two ago."
"Oh, it's going into college that is chiefly to answer for it. But I do think it's strange sometimes all in an instant we realize that we are older or different from what we were before. I really can't account for it."
"Yes,—I understand what you mean. You know those stone buildings that we pass on our way to the Nahant boat. Well, they used to seem to me mountain high, not only when I looked up at them, but when I thought about them. But one summer, years ago, I looked up and saw that they were not very high, nor very imposing. They were small buildings, compared with a good many up town; and then I felt that I must have changed."
Kate smiled. "Yes, I've been through just such things myself." And the conversation of the two cousins drifted on for a time, with reminiscences of the past.
"Ernest," at length said Kate somewhat abruptly to the young man, "after all you are more or less of a disappointment to me."
So far as appearances went, it was hard to see wherein Ernest fell short of the ideal of even so rigid a critic as Kate. Yet this well-formed, muscular youth, with his clear gray eye, seemed at this particular moment a little restless and uneasy as he fingered an ivory paper-knife.
"How do I disappoint you, Kate?" he asked.
"Oh, in many ways. I used to think that you would be an inventor, or—something. But now—"