"Mentally," she replied, with a defiant glance at Jim.
"This will be a gay place to live in if you go off for four years!" remarked that young man.
"You don't mean that you'd miss me!" she exclaimed mockingly.
"Of course I'd miss you."
"Miss the mental stimulus I give you?"—sweetly persuasive.
"Not at all. I'd miss the mental relaxation you afford my tired brain——"
"You beast! Dad, I'm going! And some day your son will find out that it's an idle mind that makes a girl restless; not a restless mind that makes her idle!"
"I was just teasing, Steve!"
"I know it." She smiled at the young fellow, but her grey eyes were brilliant. Then she turned and nestled against John Cleland: "I have made up my mind, darling, and I have decided to go to Vassar."
Home, to John Cleland and his son, had come to mean Stephanie as much as everything else under the common roof-tree.