"You know,—the way you giggled, and tossed your head, and 'made eyes,' as the French people say, at that Armitage fellow. I didn't happen to be near you to notice what you were doing until the last of the evening, but that was enough. I knew, by what I did see, how you'd been going on, for I've seen you at a party before, Dolly."
"Oh, I know what you mean; you mean that I flirt. I've heard that before, Jimmy. I can't help it if I have more attention than other girls, just because I'm lively, and know how to talk."
"Flirt! yes, that's what you call it,—that giggling, and tossing your head, and saying pert things. It's like a girl at a Park Beach picnic,—what you call 'flirting.' It is vulgar, and that's what all the fellows I know think of it; and while you think they are paying you admiring attentions, they're just having fun at your expense; and it makes me ashamed, for you are my cousin, and—"
"And you are the most conceited boy that ever lived. You think you know everything, and you don't know anything about society. A girl is always older than a boy in all society matters; everybody says so; and though you're sixteen, and I'm only fifteen, I'm a whole year ahead of you,—you're just a little boy to me. One of my sister's friends, a man who knows, said to me, this vacation, that I seemed to be eighteen rather than fifteen."
Jimmy stared at his cousin for a moment in sheer astonishment; then he exclaimed,—
"Dolly! what are you thinking of, not to see—"
"Oh, I know what you're going to say,—not to see that it is I who am conceited."
"And where did you get all that stuff in your head about society; and what idiot told you you seemed to be eighteen rather than fifteen?"
"It was no idiot," triumphantly; "it was Mr. George Atherton."
"George Atherton. Oh, then it is you who are the idiot not to see that Mr. Atherton was poking fun at you, or else he meant that you looked eighteen with your height and size altogether. But it is of no use talking to you, I see that."