Isn't that Miss Prudence
coming?"
"And the master. They did not know I would have an escort home. But do
come all the way, father will like to hear you talk about the places
you have visited."
"I travel, I don't visit places. I expect to go to London and Paris by
and by. Our buyer has been getting married and that doesn't please the
firm; he wanted to take his wife with him, but they vetoed that. They say
a married man will not attend strictly to business; see what a premium
is paid to bachelorhood. I shall understand laces well enough soon: I can
pick a piece of imitation out of a hundred real pieces now. Did Linnet
like the handkerchief and scarf?"
"You should have seen her! Hasn't she spoken of them?"
"No, she was too full of other things."
"Marriage isn't all in getting ready, to Linnet," said Marjorie,
seriously, "I found her crying one day because she was so happy and
didn't deserve to be."
"Will is a good fellow," said Hollis. "I wish I were half as good. But I
am so contradictory, so unsatisfied and so unsatisfying. I understand
myself better than I want to, and yet I do not understand myself at all."
"That is because you are _growing_," said Marjorie, with her wise air. "I
haven't settled down into a real Marjorie yet. I shouldn't know my own
picture unless I painted it myself."
"We are two rather dangerous people, aren't we?" laughed Hollis. "We will
steer clear of each other, as Will would say, until we can come to an
understanding.
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