“I ought not, Billy, but I’m going to—I can’t keep it to myself any longer.” She looked up at him, and he saw both anger and defiance in her dark, restless eyes. “My father wants me to quit school and marry an old fellow—a man nearly forty, who’s got the goods—money—and is crazy about me.”
Billy gasped. “Gee!” For a minute he could say no more, and they stood looking at each other till a passer jostled them into moving on.
“But you don’t have to! Girls aren’t like—they aren’t property any more.”
“No; but some fathers think they are.”
“Does your father?”
“Dad wouldn’t put it that way; but you see, Billy, this man who—who wants to marry me—is awfully strong with the city ring, and in some way he has dad cinched. Dad thinks he could make it square by getting him into the family.” Her little half-smile was quite without conceit.
Billy looked at her a moment before replying. Any one seeing her then could have forgiven her a little vanity. The low sun, piercing the clouds for a good-night glance, brought out the rusty reds in her softly waving dark hair, hair that at the roots melted into her creamy skin through a lighter shading that was neither red nor brown, but seemed to have been mixed on Nature’s palette for no other face than hers. Her eyes, usually too shallow and brightly brown, were now deep and misty with an emotion Billy could only guess; while all the loveliness of her gracious face and figure was enhanced by a womanly dignity new to Billy, new to herself, and unrealized.
“I guess ’most any man’d like to get into your family that way.” All the man in him had risen to her beauty; but he was not thinking of himself—not seeing himself in that relation to her. His remark was entirely impersonal.
She smiled, but instantly it changed to a look of pain. She had no measure but that of personality—herself. “Billy! Don’t! Don’t! That’s the sort of thing they all say, and they don’t mean it. I’ve—I’ve liked you awfully just because you never handed out that stuff. If I can’t trust you, there’s—there’s nobody.” There was a little catch in her voice, and she hastened on.
Billy was astonished, puzzled. In their early acquaintance he had felt and resented her coquetry, and very soon interested her in other ways; had established the same sort of comradeship that existed in his earlier boy and girl friendships; but as their acquaintance progressed he found it rich with new experiences.