Peter rounded his lips into a whistling shape. Then, "How'd you find all this out?"
"His cousin—that big, handsome, black-eyed girl over there, I've just been dancing with—told me."
"That girl with the yellow gown and all those daffodils?"
"Yes."
"She is handsome, and she knows how to dance."
"Yes, she knows how to dance, but she rattles too much."
"But she knows how to dance," repeated Peter, "and I'm going to ask her to dance with me in the Virginia reel. I always get mixed up in those old-fashioned things; but this girl will fetch me through, I know."
And Peter was right. Dorothea fetched him through beautifully, and Peter didn't in the least mind her rattling. Indeed, he seemed to encourage it and to be amused by it; for Peter, I am afraid, was that kind of young man that Kate Van der Berg declared that her brother was not,—the young man who encourages rattling, to make fun of it. But whatever Peter did was very lazily done, and his fun-making was confined mostly to his own inward reflections, with now and then the dropping of a humorous word to some favorite companion. To be sure, this humorous word of Peter's had its full effect, for Peter was not a great talker, and as he was known to be a keen-witted fellow, whatever he did say was made much of. But Peter himself hadn't a bit of malice in him, and if he had his laugh now and then at some foolish rattler, I, for one, think the rattler deserved the laugh, and came off very easily at that; for, as Jimmy Dering said once of his cousin,—
"Girls of Dolly's sort have got to learn that people are not going to be careful of them and their feelings, unless they are careful, to begin with."
And I will add that girls of Dolly's sort teach all girls how not to do it,—how not to romp and rush and rattle, and make themselves objects of ridicule, in the fond delusion that they are objects of admiration, as Dolly did on this very night.