actually smiled when she saw her aunt come in with Miss Araminta.  Smiles of late have been faint and feeble on the face of the affianced young lady, who isn’t playing her part as a person with ancestors ought to play it.  She bounced her old beau and took unto herself a new one, and what I can’t understand is, having done it, why she doesn’t carry it off with a rip-roaring bluff that might fool even herself for a while.  But Elizabeth isn’t that sort.  Everybody is talking about how miserable she looks.  I’m afraid I put the beau idea in her head, and the idea has got her in a hole and she doesn’t know how to get out of it.  I wish Billy was here.  He can get a person out of any sort of hole.

I went to the party with Whythe.  He has been away for a week, and while away got a new dress suit, which, of course, he wore to the party and looked perfectly grand in it.  I think his mother gave the suit to him, though he didn’t say, but he was off attending to some business for her, and I’m sure he took it out in the new clothes.  It would have been more sensible to have had his teeth fixed, or gotten three new ones, the rest being all right, but it was natural to prefer the suit, and much less painful.  Whythe is never going to do anything disagreeable that he can keep from doing.

He was so nice the night of the party that I hadn’t the courage to begin finding out the truth or untruth of what Mr. Willie Prince had mentioned as the reason of the rush he had been giving me, and as I don’t believe Whythe has ever thought of Father’s money, there was no need to be in a hurry to learn whether he had or not.  I’ve had a jolly good time being in love with him, and being made love to, and as an experience it may come in when I begin to write my book.  I always did want to know how many ways love can be made in, which, of course, I can never know, for there are as many ways, I guess, as there are men to make it, and the variations on the main theme are as infinitesimal as the tongues that tell the story.  It is truly wonderful how differently the same words can be trimmed up and handed out, and I like the crescendoes and diminuendoes and shades of feeling which give emphasis and expression, as my music teacher says I must be careful of when playing.  There is never going to be any crescendo or diminuendo business about Billy’s love-making, and I might as well make up my mind to that in the beginning.  It’s going to be pure staccato with him—­short and quick and soon over.  But it will last forever, Billy’s will.  He isn’t going to stand for foolishness about it when he starts, either.  He has two more years at college and then he is going in his father’s office.