"Why?"
"I couldn't tell you why. You know Thusis and I differ in some things. Thusis has her own ideas—about—the world in general. And I'm afraid her ideas are rather old fashioned, and that they are going to make her unhappy."
"Can't you tell me what her ideas are?" I asked.
"No. She may tell you if she chooses. But it isn't likely that she will. Anyway they are not my ideas. My opinion is that the way to be happy is to accept the world as it is, not as it was or should be."
"You are quite wonderful, Clelia."
"Oh, no, I'm not. I'm just a human girl who desires to be happy and who detests gloom of all sorts—gloomy ideals, gloomy pride, gloomy conventions that wrap their shrouds around the living and stifle them in a winding sheet of tradition."
I was astonished to hear this girl so fluently express herself. In her soft, fresh, brilliant beauty she seemed to have stepped but yesterday across the frontiers of adolescence.
"So, if you kiss me," she said, "I don't think the world is going to tumble to pieces. Do you?"
"I do not."
"However," she added, "if Thusis felt the way I do about the world, I wouldn't think of letting you kiss me."