"Elizabeth," I said sharply, "if you should tell him that, he would
think--that you--cared."
She swept out her arms in a charming gesture of surrender.
"Well, if he did," she cried, defiantly, "what then?"
* * * * *
All that night Elizabeth and Anne contended in my dreams, and in the
morning, worn to a frazzle, I went down to breakfast, to find that
Elizabeth had gone for a ride with Charlemagne, and that Anne was still
in bed.
I drifted into the library and found there a circle of somewhat
fagged-out feminines. The men were riding or on the links.
From the light bits of conversation that were wafted to me as I sat
and read in the window-seat, I gathered that most of the women took
Charlemagne's leap-year idea as a joke, but I knew that to Elizabeth
and Anne the question presented itself seriously, and that each would
settle it in her own way, and according to the tradition of her own
time.
For that education and environment had made the difference, I did not
doubt. Had Elizabeth been born eighteen years earlier, when women were
taught the mysteries of advance and retreat, that coquetry was their
best weapon, and that man must always be the wooer, she might have felt
all of Anne's shrinking from a revelation of herself; whereas had Anne
been brought up in the later days when boys and girls mingle in close
comradeship, when plays and books subtly analyze the state of woman as
the pursuer and man as the pursued, she might have been as frank about
her feelings as Elizabeth.
Hence, I argued, they were both of them what their generation had made
them, and I, who loved Anne, and adored her for her womanliness, was
yet forced to admit the potency of Elizabeth's youth, and the charm of
her complete surrender.
After a time the men began to drift in, and I heard the
multi-millionaire from the West inquiring for Elizabeth. He was a big,
broad-shouldered fellow, sure of himself, but not unpleasantly so, and
when he couldn't find the girl he wanted, he came over and talked to me.
"Say," he began at once, "it's all tommyrot about this leap-year
business. When I want a girl to do anything, I want to ask her. It
makes me feel foolish to have to wait for her to come to me. I wish
Dabney would cut it out."
"But think what an opportunity for a girl to get what _she_ wants," I
said.
"They don't know what they want," he stated dogmatically. "The way to
win a woman is to pick her up and put her on a horse and run away with
her----"
"Suppose she doesn't care to be run away with?" I asked.
"Oh, she'd settle down to it," he said securely; "and besides that, I
can't really imagine a nice girl asking a man to marry her."
I thought of Elizabeth as she had stood with her hand on her heart and
had hurled defiance at conventions.
"Girls are hard to understand," I murmured.
"Oh, I don't know," he contended. "If a man gets right down to
primitive principles and keeps after her, he'll get her--and it makes
me hot to think I am wasting valuable time trying to stick to Dabney's
old rules, when I have to go back West again on Monday."