He couldn’t remember any; then she would start one.
“First,” she began, “I want to know why you didn’t walk home with me the night of the picnic at Top-o’-the-Hill—when Leopold sang ‘Forty year on.’ I wrote you a little note asking you to go with me. You trotted off with Kate and left me with Leopold. We had the deuce of a time, I can tell you.”
Conscience-stricken, he remembered that half-read letter. The offer of the lectures had swamped his mind.
The explanation satisfied.
“Leopold wants to marry me,” she blurted out next.
“I know,” he replied gravely. “He told me as much,—but at seventeen! Think of it!”
“I wish you would not always be telling me that I am—” she began indignantly.
“But you are, you know,” he told her quietly. “Leopold is as old as I, but a man couldn’t possib—”
“Oh,” she laughed. “He couldn’t? Couldn’t he! He’s been dogging me for ever so long. You make a big mistake about years. Everybody does. At thirteen, when I first talked with you, I was as much a woman as I am now or ever will be. And I’ve been sitting back trying to behave myself like a doll. At fifteen I had my height and—everything; and now I’m eighteen. I can’t stay in the refrigerator any longer, I tell you.... Leopold? Child? Let me tell you something, Allen Blynn. Leopold and I had a fight that night. Not words, remember; but an ugly real fight, with fists and hands.... He knows I’m no child.... Now wait!” she held up her hand. “Leopold’s all right. He wants to marry me. He did just what he ought to have done. It was all right, absolutely right. It was my fault again. You went off and deserted me—and I just didn’t care what happened to me. Then I had to fight my way out. Nom d’une pipe! Nom du nom d’une pipe!... And that isn’t all. I must shock your old professorial head a little. There was another.... But I woke up and got out. Your letter did it—the one on morals and instincts, and that terrible story of the leper; don’t you remember?”
Yes, he remembered. The little woman before him was opening up astonishing vistas into her stirring life. But she was a child, he insisted. The general appearance was that of a woman; but that was a trick of hat and gown and hair, a disguise easily seen through. Her face was womanly, and her voice; but in both were cries of very young life. Her very wonderful health, the thing that gave her beauty—that was youth; and her frankness was the innocence of youth.