Marion came quickly up from the other side.
"Flossy," she said, with sudden sharpness, "come over here and watch the track of the boat through the water." And as Flossy mechanically obeyed, she added: "What a foolish, heedless little mouse you are! I wonder that your mother let you go from her sight. Don't you know that you mustn't get up conversations with strange young men in that fashion?"
Flossy had not thought of it at all: but now she said a little drearily, as if the subject did not interest her:
"But I have often held conversations with strange young men at the dancing-hall, you know, and danced with them, too, when everything I knew about them was their names, and generally I forgot that."
Marion gave a light laugh.
"That is different," she said, letting her lip curl in the darkness over the folly of her own words. "What its proper at a dance in very improper coming home from prayer-meeting, don't you see?"
"What do you think!" she said the minute they were in their rooms. "There was I, leaning meditatively over the boat, thinking solemnly on the truths I had heard, and that absurd little water-proof morsel was having a flirtation with a nice young man. Here is one of the fruits of the system! What on earth was he saying to you, Flossy?"
"Don't!" said Flossy, for the second time that evening. "He wasn't saying any harm."
The whole thing jarred on her with an inexpressible and to her bewildering pain. She had always been ready for fun before.
"That girl is homesick or something," Marion said, as she and Eurie went to their rooms, leaving Flossy with Ruth, who prefered her as a room-mate to either of the others because she could keep from talking.