CHAPTER XI

Billy has been pretty good about writing.  Much better than I have been.  I told him I would tell him all about Twickenham and the people, and what they did and how they did, and I intended to do it, but that is my chief trouble.  I’m a grand intender and a poor doer.  Billy never promises and always does.  He sends cards from every place, he goes to, and a good many from the same place so I can see what he is seeing, which I couldn’t do if he wrote a book of descriptions.  He doesn’t tell much about the cities and towns, most of which I have been in myself and am glad he leaves out, but he writes awfully interesting things about the places he pokes into by himself and the people he meets, and I almost die laughing over his accounts of his sister and a beau his mother has caught for her.  She is a dandy-looking girl, his sister is, and wears the smartest clothes I ever saw except Florine’s, and if Patricia has really landed a duke or a count or a thing of that sort, his mother will have a wedding that will fit the fellow all right.  He’s apt to be landed.

I never have understood how Billy was born of his parents.  He cares no more for flum-foolishness than I do, which is why we have so much fun over the efforts certain mothers we know make to help their daughters get married, and we’ve decided to be failures as social successes and enjoy ourselves.  My mother isn’t at all like his mother.  She is a precious mother, mine is, and adores Father and her children, but she is in the parade and has to keep step, not having courage to get out, and she thinks she must give her daughters every opportunity, and for daughters in Mother’s world opportunity means marriage.  Until she gets us settled she won’t feel as if her duty had been done.  That’s why she has gone with Florine and Jessica to the same place Florine went to last summer with the Logans.  Florine has had a good many beaux, but none of them has been just what she had set her mind on, and last summer she met a man I believe she fell in love with.  Anyhow, she has gone where it will be convenient for him to see her if he wants to, and he must want, as Mother says in every one of her letters that Mr. Jeffry has just come or just gone.  He came to see Florine last winter, and a blind person could tell he was worth having.  I hope they will take each other.  Mother would be so pleased.  Jessica and I are not apt to do much for ourselves in the marrying line, so it is left to Florine to make the catch.

She is very beautiful, Florine is.  She knows it and she loves beautiful things and wouldn’t think of marrying any one who could not give them to her.  She wouldn’t marry a man who isn’t decent and straight and all that, not being that kind, but neither is she romantic, and nothing on earth could make her lose her head.  She is cool and deliberate and far-seeing, and not apt to ask herself too many questions about love alone when thinking about marriage.  She is a dream to look at, which Jessica isn’t, but I love Jessica best.