That had comforted her.  She had determined then never to marry but to hang around, as he suggested, for the rest of her life.  She was quite earnest about it, and resolved.

She picked up the blue dress and standing before her mirror, held it up before her.  It looked rather shabby, she thought, but the theater was not like a dance, and anyhow it would look better at night.  She had been thinking about next Wednesday evening ever since Dick Livingstone had gone.  It seemed, better somehow, frightfully important.  It was frightfully important.  For the first time she acknowledged to herself that she had been fond of him, as she put it, for a long time.  She had an odd sense, too, of being young and immature, and as though he had stooped to her from some height:  such as thirty-two years and being in the war, and having to decide about life and death, and so on.

She hoped he did not think she was only a child.

She heard Nina coming up the stairs.  At the click of her high heels on the hard wood she placed the dress on the bed again, and went to the window.  Her father was on the path below, clearly headed for a walk.  She knew then that Nina had been asking for something.

Nina came in and closed the door.  She was smaller than Elizabeth and very pretty.  Her eyebrows had been drawn to a tidy line, and from the top of her shining head to her brown suede pumps she was exquisite with the hours of careful tending and careful dressing she gave her young body.  Exquisitely pretty, too.

She sat down on Elizabeth’s bed with a sigh.

“I really don’t know what to do with father,” she said.  “He flies off at a tangent over the smallest things.  Elizabeth dear, can you lend me twenty dollars?  I’ll get my allowance on Tuesday.”

“I can give you ten.”

“Well, ask mother for the rest, won’t you?  You needn’t say it’s for me.  I’ll give it to you Tuesday.”

“I’m not going to mother, Nina.  She has had a lot of expenses this month.”

“Then I’ll borrow it from Wallie Sayre,” Nina said, accepting her defeat cheerfully.  “If it was an ordinary bill it could wait, but I lost it at bridge last night and it’s got to be paid.”

“You oughtn’t to play bridge for money,” Elizabeth said, a bit primly.  “And if Leslie knew you borrowed from Wallace Sayre—­”

“I forgot!  Wallie’s downstairs, Elizabeth.  Really, if he wasn’t so funny, he’d be tragic.”

“Why tragic?  He has everything in the world.”

“If you use a little bit of sense, you can have it too.”

“I don’t want

“Pooh!  That’s what you think now.  Wallie’s a nice person.  Lots of girls are mad about him.  And he has about all the money there is.”  Getting no response from Elizabeth, she went on:  “I was thinking it over last night.  You’ll have to marry sometime, and it isn’t as though Wallie was dissipated, or anything like that.  I suppose he knows his way about, but then they all do.”