“I don’t!” she answered.  “I don’t!” Then suddenly, without being able to prevent it, she sobbed.

“No,” he said, gently, “I see you don’t.  And you let yourself be a fool because there are a lot of fools in there.”

She gave way, all at once, to a gust of sorrow and bitterness; she bent far over and caught his hand and laid it against her wet cheek.  “Oh, Joe,” she whispered, brokenly, “I think we have such hard lives, you and I!  It doesn’t seem right —­while we’re so young!  Why can’t we be like the others?  Why can’t we have some of the fun?”

He withdrew his hand, with the embarrassment and shame he would have felt had she been a boy.  “Get out!” he said, feebly.

She did not seem to notice, but, still stooping, rested her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands.  “I try so hard to have fun, to be like the rest,—­and it’s always a mistake, always, always, always!” She rocked herself, slightly, from side to side.  “I am a fool, it’s the truth, or I wouldn’t have come to-night.  I want to be attractive—­I want to be in things.  I want to laugh like they do—­”

“To laugh just to laugh, and not because there’s something funny?”

“Yes, I do, I do!  And to know how to dress and to wear my hair—­there must be some place where you can learn those things.  I’ve never had any one to show me!  Ah!  Grandfather said something like that this afternoon—­poor man!  We’re in the same case.  If we only had some one to show us!  It all seems so blind, here in Canaan, for him and me!  I don’t say it’s not my own fault as much as being poor.  I’ve been a hoyden; I don’t feel as if I’d learned how to be a girl yet, Joe.  It’s only lately I’ve cared, but I’m seventeen, Joe, and—­and to-day—­to-day—­I was sent home—­and to-night—­” She faltered, came to a stop, and her whole body was shaken with sobs.  “I hate myself so for crying—­for everything!”

“I’ll tell you something,” he whispered, chuckling desperately. “’Gene made me unpack his trunk, and I don’t believe he’s as great a man at college as he is here.  I opened one of his books, and some one had written in it, `Prigamaloo Bantry, the Class Try-To-Be’!  He’d never noticed, and you ought to have heard him go on!  You’d have just died, Ariel—­I almost bust wide open!  It was a mean trick in me, but I couldn’t help showing it to him.”

Joe’s object was obtained.  She stopped crying, and, wiping her eyes, smiled faintly.  Then she became grave.  “You’re jealous of Eugene,” she said.

He considered this for a moment.  “Yes,” he answered, thoughtfully, “I am.  But I wouldn’t think about him differently on that account.  And I wouldn’t talk about him to any one but you.”

“Not even to—­” She left the question unfinished.

“No,” he said, quietly.  “Of course not.”

“No?  Because it wouldn’t be any use?”

“I don’t know.  I never have a chance to talk to her, anyway.”