“I’m always ready, to swear off,” said the young man, gloomily.  He added, “But you’ve got brains, Bess, and I hate to see you playing the fool.”

“Do you really, Alan?” asked the girl, pleased perhaps as much by his reproach as by his praise.  “Do you think I’ve got brains?”

“You’re the only girl that has.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to ask so much as that!  But what’s the reason I can’t do anything with them?  Other girls draw, and play, and write.  I don’t do anything but go in for the excitement that’s bad for me.  I wish you’d explain it.”

Alan Lynde did not try.  The question seemed to turn his thoughts back upon himself to dispiriting effect.  “I’ve got brains, too, I believe,” he began.

“Lots of them!” cried his sister, generously.  “There isn’t any of the men to compare with you.  If I had you to talk with all the time, I shouldn’t want jays.  I don’t mean to flatter.  You’re a constant feast of reason; I don’t care for flows of soul.  You always take right views of things when you’re yourself, and even when you’re somebody else you’re not stupid.  You could be anything you chose.”

“The devil of it is I can’t choose,” he replied.

“Yes, I suppose that’s the devil of it,” said the girl.

“You oughtn’t to use such language as that, Bess,” said her brother, severely.

“Oh, I don’t with everybody,” she returned.  “Never with ladies!”

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye with a smile at once rueful and comic.

“You got me, I guess, that time,” he owned.

“‘Touche’,’ Mr. Durgin says.  He fences, it seems, and he speaks French.  It was like an animal speaking French; you always expect them to speak English.  But I don’t mind your swearing before me; I know that it helps to carry off the electricity.”  She laughed, and made him laugh with her.

“Is there anything to him?” he growled, when they stopped laughing.

“Yes, a good deal,” said Bessie, with an air of thoughtfulness; and then she went on to tell all that Jeff had told her of himself, and she described his aplomb in dealing with the benevolent Bevidge, as she called her, and sketched his character, as it seemed to her.  The sketch was full of shrewd guesses, and she made it amusing to her brother, who from the vantage of his own baddishness no doubt judged the original more intelligently.

“Well, you’d better let him alone, after this,” he said, at the end.

“Yes,” she pensively assented.  “I suppose it’s as if you took to some very common kind of whiskey, isn’t it?  I see what you mean.  If one must, it ought to be champagne.”

She turned upon him a look of that keen but limited knowledge which renders women’s conjectures of evil always so amusing, or so pathetic, to men.

“Better let the champagne alone, too,” said her brother, darkly.

“Yes, I know that,” she admitted, and she lay back in her chair, looking dreamily into the fire.  After a while she asked, abruptly:  “Will you give it up if I will?”