“Oh, but Eve!” protested her father.  Nervously he jumped up and began to pace the room.  One side of his face was quite grotesquely distorted, and his lean fingers, thrust precipitously into his pockets, were digging frenziedly into their own palms.  “Oh, but Eve!” he reiterated sharply, “you will be happy with John!  I know you will!  John is a—­John is a—­Underneath all that slowness, that ponderous slowness—­that—­that—­Underneath that—­”

“That longish—­reddish—­grayish beard?” interpolated little Eve Edgarton.

Glaringly for an instant the old eyes and the young eyes challenged each other, and then the dark eyes retreated suddenly before—­not the strength but the weakness of their opponents.

“Oh, very well, Father,” assented little Eve Edgarton.  “Only—­” ruggedly the soft little chin thrust itself forth into stubborn outline again.  “Only, Father,” she articulated with inordinate distinctness, “you might just as well understand here and now, I won’t budge one inch toward Nunko-Nono—­not one single solitary little inch toward Nunko-Nono—­unless at London, or Lisbon, or Odessa, or somewhere, you let me fill up all the trunks I want to—­with just plain pretties—­to take to Nunko-Nono!  It isn’t exactly, you know, like a bride moving fifty miles out from town somewhere,” she explained painstakingly.  “When a bride goes out to a place like Nunko-Nono, it isn’t enough, you understand, that she takes just the things she needs.  What she’s got to take, you see, is everything under the sun—­that she ever may need!”

With a little soft sigh of finality she sank back into her pillows, and then struggled up for one brief instant again to add a postscript, as it were, to her ultimatum.  “If my day is over—­without ever having been begun,” she said, “why, it’s over—­without ever having been begun!  And that’s all there is to it!  But when it comes to Henrietta,” she mused, “Henrietta’s going to have five-inch hair-ribbons—­and everything else—­from the very start!”

“Eh?” frowned Edgarton, and started for the door.

“And oh, Father!” called Eve, just as his hand touched the door-knob.  “There’s something I want to ask you for Henrietta’s sake.  It’s rather a delicate question, but after I’m married I suppose I shall have to save all my delicate questions to—­ask John; and John, somehow, has never seemed to me particularly canny about anything except—­geology.  Father!” she asked, “just what is it—­that you consider so particularly obnoxious in—­in—­young men?  Is it their sins?”

“Sins!” jerked her father.  “Bah!  It’s their traits!”

“So?” questioned little Eve Edgarton from her pillows.  “So?  Such as—­what?”