“No, I don’t,” she replied, with a touch of sadness.  “I sometimes wish that I did.”

“You wish that you did!” Here was surprise at last.  “But, why, in Heaven’s name, should you wish that when you are everything that they ought to be?”

“As if that mattered!” There was a tone in her voice that was new to him.  “It’s gone out of fashion to be superior.  Nobody even cares any longer about your being what you ought to be.  I’ve been trained to be the kind of girl that doesn’t get on to-day, full of all sorts of forgotten virtues and refinements.  Nobody looks at me because everybody is staring so hard at the girls who are improperly dressed.  There is only one place where I can be sure of having attention, and that is in an Old Ladies’ Home.  Old ladies admire me.”

For the second time that day he found himself startled by the eccentricities of the feminine mind; but in Margaret’s passive resignation there was none of Patty’s rebellion against the cruelty and injustice of life.  Generations of acquiescence were in the slender figure before him; and he realized that the completeness of her surrender to Fate must have softened her destiny.  Both girls were victims of the changing fashion in women, of an age that moved not in a stream, but in a whirlpool.

“I admire you,” he said in a caressing voice, “more than I admire any one else in the world.”

She had been gazing into the fire, and as she turned slowly in answer to his words, it seemed to him that the blue of a summer sky shone on him from beneath the tremulous shadow of her eyelashes.

“The trouble,” she replied, with an appealing glance, “is that I don’t know how to be common.  There isn’t any hope of a girl’s being popular if she doesn’t know how to be common.  I would be if I could,” she confessed plaintively, “but I haven’t the faintest idea how to begin.”

“I hope you’ll never learn,” he insisted.  In awakening his sympathy she had awakened also a deep-rooted protective instinct.  He felt that he longed to guard and defend her, as a brother of course, and if this newer and tenderer sentiment was the result of feminine calculation, he was too chivalrous or too inexperienced to perceive it.  What he perceived was simply that this lovely girl, whom he had known from infancy, had opened her heart and taken him into her confidence.  To admit that she was not a success in her small social world, proved her, he felt, to be both frank and courageous.

“Of course they don’t call their way common,” she pursued, with what seemed to him the most touching candour.  “Their word for it is ’pep’.”  She pronounced the vulgar syllable as if she abhorred it.  “That is what I haven’t got, and that’s why I have never been a real success in anything except church work.  Even in the Red Cross it was ‘pep’ that counted most, and that was the reason they never sent me to Europe.  Mother tried to make me into the kind of girl that men admired when she was young; but the type has gone out of fashion to-day just as much as crinolines or a small waist.  If I were clever I suppose I could make myself over and begin to jump about and imitate the sort of animation I never had; but I’m not really clever, for I’ve tried and I can’t do it.  It only makes me feel silly to pretend to be what I am not.”