As I have said before, we were not intimate this winter. I was not of an age to be interested in a little girl in the schoolroom, and Mademoiselle Blois took care not to allow the little girl in the schoolroom to take an interest in me. Occasionally, however, when she was with her father and I joined them, the memories we shared between us broke through the gossamer web of diffidence which shackled us both, and for a little while we would be as free as in the old childish confidential days on the seashore or back among the brown stubble of the stripped harvest-fields of the uplands. At these times she would ask me many questions about Georgy Lenox, and when I told her that Georgy was quite a grown woman now, and engaged to my friend Jack Holt, she thought it wonderful and strange.
"But why?" I asked. "Georgy is a trifle older than I am, and I am now almost nineteen."
"Everybody is so old!" she said with a droll little gesture of despair. "It seems to me I shall never grow up."
"Oh yes, you will soon be fourteen: I have heard you say your mother was married when she was seventeen: that is only three years off; and Georgy Lenox is much older, and only just engaged, and will not be married until Jack is out of college and a partner in his father's business."
"Does he like her very much?" asked Helen solemnly.
"Well, yes: he has loved her ever since she was a very little girl. He has spent all his money upon her: he knows all her little needs, her tastes. I have been out shopping with him frequently when he would devote hours to the matching of a shade of ribbon or the selection of a peculiar color of gloves. Harry Dart is never tired of making fun of Jack, for the dear old fellow is a little absurd in his painstaking for a capricious girl who does not even know her own mind, and is certain to find fault with even his most fastidious choice."
"I should not like that," said Helen, so decidedly that I looked with some surprise at the expression of her imperious face. "I should want to have everything, and give it all to him."
"To whom? to Jack?"
"Oh, dear me, no! You know what I mean."
I understood her, and I made an involuntary grimace in thinking of mademoiselle's chaste teachings in the schoolroom. Here was a little girl of fourteen with her mind made up about what she would do for the lover who was to come out of Shadowland some day.