[Illustration:  “A smartly dressed and very confident drummer.”]

And all the while she giggled with Rita in a most shameless and undignified fashion, went about hatless, with hair blowing and sleeves rolled up; decorated a donation party at the local minister’s and flirted with him till his gold-rimmed eye-glasses protruded; behaved like a thoughtful and considerate angel to the old, uninteresting and infirm; romped like a young goddess with the adoring children of the boarders, and was fiercely detested by the crocheting spinsters rocking in acidulated rows on the piazza.

The table was meagre and awful and pruneful; but she ate with an appetite that amazed Rita, whose sophisticated palate was grossly insulted thrice daily.

“How on earth you can contrive to eat that hash,” she said, resentfully, “I don’t understand.  When my Maillard’s give out I’ll quietly starve in a daisy field somewhere.”

“Close your eyes and pretend you and Sam are dining at the Knickerbocker,” suggested Valerie, cheerfully.  “That’s what I do when the food doesn’t appeal to me.”

“With whom do you pretend you are dining?”

“Sometimes with Louis Neville, sometimes with Querida,” she, said, frankly.  “It helps the hash wonderfully.  Try it, dear.  Close your eyes and visualise some agreeable man, and the food isn’t so very awful.”

Rita laughed:  “I’m not as fond of men as that.”

“Aren’t you?  I am.  I do like an agreeable man, and I don’t mind saying so.”

“I’ve observed that,” said Rita, still laughing.

“Of course you have.  I’ve spent too many years without them not to enjoy them now—­bless their funny hearts!”

“I’m glad there are no men here,” observed Rita.

“But there are men here,” said Valerie, innocently.

“Substitutes.  Lemons.”

“The minister is superficially educated—­”

“He’s a muff.”

“A nice muff.  I let him pat my gloved hand.”

“You wicked child.  He’s married.”

“He only patted it in spiritual emphasis, dear.  Married or single he’s more agreeable to me than that multi-coloured drummer.  I let the creature drive me to the post office in a buckboard, and he continued to sit closer until I took the reins, snapped the whip, and drove at a gallop over that terrible stony road.  And he is so fat that it nearly killed him.  It killed all sentiment in him, anyway.”

Rita, stretched lazily in a hammock and displaying a perfectly shod foot and silken ankle to the rage of the crocheters on the veranda, said dreamily: 

“The unfortunate thing about us is that we know too much to like the only sort of men who are likely to want to marry us.”

“What of it?” laughed Valerie.  “We don’t want to marry them—­or anybody.  Do we?”

“Don’t you?”

“Don’t I what?”

“Want to get married?”

“I should think not.”