"Of course, Coleman's a perfectly decent fellow---" Billy began, with brotherly uneasiness.
"Oh, absolutely!" Susan could laugh, in her perfect confidence. "He acts exactly as if I were his sister, or another boy. He never even--put his arm about me," she explained, "and I--I don't know just what he DOES mean---"
"Sure," said Billy, thoughtfully.
"Of course, there's no reason why a man and a girl can't be good friends just as two men would," Susan said, more lightly, after a pause.
"Oh, yes there is! Don't you fool yourself!" Billy said, gloomily. "That's all rot!"
"Well, a girl can't stay moping in the house until a man comes along and says, 'If I take you to the theater it means I want to marry you!'" Susan declared with spirit. "I--I can't very well turn to Peter now and say, 'This ends everything, unless you are in earnest!'"
Her distress, her earnestness, her eagerness for his opinion, had carried her quite out of herself. She rested her face in her hands, and fixed her anxious eyes upon him.
"Well, here's the way I figure it out," Billy said, deliberately, drawing his pencil slowly along the edge of his T-square, and squinting at it absorbedly, "Coleman has a crush on you, all right, and he'd rather be with you than anyone else---"
"Yes," nodded Susan. "I know that, because---"
"Well. But you see you're so fixed that you can't entertain him here, Sue, and you don't run in his crowd, so when he wants to see you he has to go out of his way to do it. So his rushing you doesn't mean as much as it otherwise would."