Her prettiness, indeed, was chiefly in slender plumpness and bloom. But it served her purpose as no classic mould would have done. She did not overestimate it. But she was probably better satisfied with it than with most of those conditions of her life that people were always telling her were ideal. They spoke of her as the only child in a way that implied congratulations on the undivided inheritance—and that reminded her how she had always wanted a sister. They talked of her idyllic life on a blue-grass stock-farm—when she was wheedling from her father a winter in Washington. They envied her often when they had the very thing she wanted—or, at least, she didn't have it. They enlarged on her popularity, and she answered, “Oh yes, nice boys, most of them, but—”
She had always said, “When I marry,” not “if,” and had said it much as she said, “When I grow up.” And, yes, she believed in fate: that everybody who belonged to you would find you out; but—it was only hospitable to meet them half-way! So her admirers found her in the beginning hopefully interested, and in the end rather mournfully unconvinced. Her regret seemed so genuinely on her own account as well as theirs that they usually carried off a very kind feeling for her. She was equally open to enlistment in any other proposed diversion. For Bessie lived in a constant state of great expectation that something really nice would really happen to-morrow. There was always something wrong to-day.
“It's not fair!” she complained to Guy Osbourne, when he came to tell her good-by, all in the gray. “I'm positively discriminated against. If I have an engagement, it's sure to rain! And now just when I'm beginning to be a grown young lady, with a prospect at last of a thoroughly good time, a war has to break out!”
Her petulance was pretty. Guy laughed. “How disobliging!” he sympathized. “And how modest!” he added—which the reader may disentangle; Bessie did not. “At last!” he mocked her.
For Bessie Hall, whose community already moved in an orbit around her, and whose parents had, according to a familiar phrase, an even more circumscribed course around her little finger—for Bessie Hall to rail at fate was deliciously absurd, delightfully feminine!
When Bessie was most unreasonable one only wanted to kiss her. Guy's privileges in that line had passed with the days when he used to pick up bodily his lithe little playfellow to cross a creek or rain-puddled road. But to-day seemed pleasantly momentous; it called for the unusual. “I say, Bibi, when a knight went off to fight, you know, his lady used to give him a stirrup-cup at good-by. Don't you think it would be really sweet of you—”
She held off, only to be provoking. She would have thought no more of kissing Guy than a brother—or she thought she wouldn't. To be sure, she hadn't for years; there was no occasion; and then, of course, one didn't. She laughed and shook her head, and retreated laughing. And he promptly captured her.... She freed herself, suddenly serious. And Guy stood sobered—sobered not at going to the war, but at leaving her.
“There now, run along.”
“Well, good-by.” But he lingered. There was nothing more to say, but he lingered. “Well, good-by. Be good, Bibi.”
“It looks as if that was all I'd have a chance to be.” The drawl of the light voice with its rising inflection was so engaging, no one called it nasal. “And it's so much more difficult and important to be charming!”