“Oh yes.”
“I thought you were rather round-shouldered.”
Knight looked slightly redder.
“And that there was a little bald spot on the top of your head.”
“Heh-heh! Two ineradicable defects,” said Knight, there being a faint ghastliness discernible in his laugh. “They are much worse in a lady’s eye than being thought self-conscious, I suppose.”
“Ah, that’s very fine,” she said, too inexperienced to perceive her hit, and hence not quite disposed to forgive his notes. “You alluded to me in that entry as if I were such a child, too. Everybody does that. I cannot understand it. I am quite a woman, you know. How old do you think I am?”
“How old? Why, seventeen, I should say. All girls are seventeen.”
“You are wrong. I am nearly nineteen. Which class of women do you like best, those who seem younger, or those who seem older than they are?”
“Off-hand I should be inclined to say those who seem older.”
So it was not Elfride’s class.