Kate laughed. "Well, we can't have regular grown-ups, you know, and we don't want them. But we can have them all the way from fifteen to eighteen, I believe."
"How odd! Doesn't Miss Marr think we are up to conversation with grown-up young gentlemen?"
"She thinks probably that 'grown-up gentlemen,' as you call them,—gentlemen out in society,—wouldn't care to come to a school-girl party, and that it is much more suitable to have boys of our own age,—boys we all know, or most of us know, at any rate, and who have something the same interests that we have,—school interests, and things of that kind. For my part, I shouldn't know what to say to gentlemen so much older than myself."
"Oh, wouldn't you?" cried Dolly, with an air—a knowing sort of air—that exasperated Kate. "I have a grown-up sister, and I've seen a good many of her gentlemen visitors. I never found it hard to talk to them," went on Dolly, with a still more knowing air.
"And I have a grown-up brother," retorted Kate, "and I've heard him tell how men go on about half-grown girls and their forwardness and boldness and pertness, and how they—the young men—disliked that kind of thing, or else amused themselves with it for a little while, and then made fun of it."
Dolly's face had flushed scarlet at these words, and at the end she burst forth angrily,—
"I suppose you mean that when I talked with my sister's, I must have been forward and bold and pert."
It was Kate's turn now to flush. She saw that in her irritation—Dolly was apt to irritate her—she had been unwarrantably rude, and swallowing her mortification, she at once made haste to say,—
"I beg your pardon, I—I shouldn't have spoken as I did. I am very sorry."
Dolly gave a quick glance at the speaker, hesitated a moment, as if waiting for something further, then jumped up and flounced out of the room with an angry impetus that there was no mistaking.