"Grace!"
"Don't look at me in that shocked way, mother. I am just voicing what every woman knows—that the men who ask her aren't the ones she would have picked out if she had had the choice. And Mary will wait and weary, and Roger will worship and hang back, and in the meantime Porter will demand and demand and demand—and in the end he'll probably get what he wants."
Aunt Frances beamed. "I hope so."
"But Mary will be miserable."
"Then she'll be very silly."
Grace sighed. "No woman is silly who asks for the best. Mother, I'd love to marry a man with a mission—I'd like to go to the South Sea Islands and teach the natives, or to Darkest Africa—or to China, or India, anywhere away from a life in which there's nothing but bridge, and shopping, and deadly dullness."
She was in earnest now, and her mother saw it.
"I don't see how you can say such things," she quavered. "I don't see how you can talk of going to such impossible places—away from me."
Grace cut short the plaintive wail.
"Of course I have no idea of going," she said, "but such a life would furnish its own adventures; I wouldn't have to manufacture them."