"Good girl!" Fred said, with a relieved look. "You scared the stuffing out of me for a minute!"
"You needn't be worried," Laura told her, dryly. "Jack has not played with my young affections. Oh, no; I'm cut out for an old maid! I'm not clever like you."
Frederica, in genuine relief from that moment of anxiety, was betrayed into reassuring truth-telling: "Mother says men don't like clever women."
"If Aunt Bessie could hear H. M. talk about you she'd change her mind."
Fred threw an impulsive arm about her and kissed her. "Oh, Laura!" she said. Laura laughed, and kissed her back again, and said if she didn't get out she'd fall asleep in her arms.
But when Fred, blushing like any ordinary girl, had left her to those deferred slumbers, Laura Childs lay awake a long time....
Frederica, alone in her tiny room, had a very sober minute. As she thought it over, Laura's "loathing" did not seem quite convincing. "She's got something on her chest," Fred said. Even when they were little girls she had loved her cousin more than any one in the world, and to have Laura depressed disturbed her sharply. "Can it be Jack?" she asked herself. "I wish Payton or Bobby would kick him!" That she should hand the infliction of such chastisement over to a brother showed that Fred could revert to the type she despised. But she was so troubled about Lolly that she almost forgot her satisfaction in being told—what she already knew!—that Howard appreciated her cleverness.