"Your answer is as rude as though I were twenty, instead of sixteen," said Sweetheart. "If you treat me as a child from this moment, I shall hate you."
"Me—Sweetheart?"
"And that name!—it is good for children and kittens."
I looked at her seriously. "It is good for women, too—when it is time," I said. "I prophesy that one day you will hear it again. As for me, I shall not call you by that name if you dislike it."
"I am a woman—now," she said.
"Oh! at sixteen."
"To-morrow I am to be seventeen."
Presently, looking off at the blue hills, I said: "For a long time I have recognised that that subtle, indefinable attitude—we call it deference—due from men to women is due from us to you. Donny and Walter are slower to accept this. You know what you have been to us as a child; we can't bear to lose you—to meet you in another way—to reckon with you as we reckon with a woman. But it is true: our little Sweetheart has vanished, and—you are here!"
The oak leaves began to rustle in the hill winds; the crows cawed from the woods.
"Oui c'est moi," she said at length.