“Oh, you needn’t be surprised,” she threw at him half angrily.  “Don’t you suppose I know that better than you do.  Don’t you suppose I know what the girls you are used to look like?  Well, I do.  I’ve watched ’em, on the street, on the campus, in church, everywhere.  I’ve even seen your sister and watched her, too.  Somebody pointed her out to me once when she had made a hit in a play and I’ve seen her at Glee Club concerts and at vespers in the choir.  She is lovely—­lovely the way I’d like to be.  It isn’t that she’s any prettier.  She isn’t.  It’s just that she’s different—­acts different—­looks different—­dresses different from me.  I can’t make myself like her and the rest, no matter how I try.  And I do try.  You don’t know how hard I try.  I got this dress because I saw your sister Tony wearing a pink dress once.  I thought maybe it would make me look more like her.  But it doesn’t.  It makes me look more not like her than ever, doesn’t it?” she appealed rather disconcertingly.  “It’s horrid.  I hate it.”

“I don’t know much about girls’ dresses,” said Ted.  “But, now you speak of it, maybe it would be prettier if it were a little—­” he paused for a word—­“quieter,” he decided on.  “Do you ever wear white?  Tony wears it a lot and I think she looks nice in it.”

“I’ve got a white dress.  I thought about putting it on to-day.  But somehow it didn’t look quite nice enough.  I thought—­well, I thought I looked handsomer in the pink.  I wanted to look pretty—­for you.”  The last was very low—­scarcely audible.

“You look good to me all right,” said the boy heartily and he meant it.  He thought she looked prettier at the moment than she had looked at any time since he had made her acquaintance.

Perhaps he was right.  She had laid aside for once her mask of hard boldness and was just a simple, humble, rather pathetic little girl, voicing secret aspirations toward a fineness life had denied her.

“I say, Madeline,” Ted went on.  “You don’t—­meet other chaps the way you met me to-day, do you?” Set the blind to lead the blind!  If there was anything absurd in scapegrace Ted’s turning mentor he was unconscious of the absurdity, was exceedingly in earnest.

“What’s that to you?” She snapped the mask back into place.

“Nothing—­that is—­I wouldn’t—­that’s all.”

She laughed shrilly.

“You’re a pretty one to talk,” she scoffed.

Ted flushed.

“I know I am.  See here, Madeline.  You’re dead right.  I ought not to have taken you out last night.  I ought not to have let you meet me here to-day.”

“I made you—­I made you do both those things.”

Ted shook his head at that.

“A man’s to blame always,” he asserted.

“No, he isn’t,” denied Madeline.  “A girl’s to blame always.”

They stared at each other a moment while the brook tinkled through the silence.  Then they both laughed at the solemnity of their contradictions.