“Didn’t, hey?” William looked blank.

“Oh, never!” Susan said, meeting his look bravely.  “He’s—­he’s too much of a gentleman, Bill!”

“Perhaps that’s being a gentleman, and perhaps it’s not,” said Billy, scowling.  “He—­but he—­he makes love to you, doesn’t he?” The crude phrase was the best he could master in this delicate matter.

“I don’t—­I don’t know!” said Susan, laughing, but with flaming cheeks.  “That’s it!  He—­he isn’t sentimental.  I don’t believe he ever would be, it’s not his nature.  He doesn’t take anything very seriously, you know.  We talk all the time, but not about really serious things.”  It sounded a little lame.  Susan halted.

“Of course, Coleman’s a perfectly decent fellow—–­” Billy began, with brotherly uneasiness.

“Oh, absolutely!” Susan could laugh, in her perfect confidence.  “He acts exactly as if I were his sister, or another boy.  He never even--put his arm about me,” she explained, “and I—­I don’t know just what he does mean—–­”

“Sure,” said Billy, thoughtfully.

“Of course, there’s no reason why a man and a girl can’t be good friends just as two men would,” Susan said, more lightly, after a pause.

“Oh, yes there is!  Don’t you fool yourself!” Billy said, gloomily.  “That’s all rot!”

“Well, a girl can’t stay moping in the house until a man comes along and says, ’If I take you to the theater it means I want to marry you!’” Susan declared with spirit.  “I—­I can’t very well turn to Peter now and say, ’This ends everything, unless you are in earnest!’”

Her distress, her earnestness, her eagerness for his opinion, had carried her quite out of herself.  She rested her face in her hands, and fixed her anxious eyes upon him.

“Well, here’s the way I figure it out,” Billy said, deliberately, drawing his pencil slowly along the edge of his T-square, and squinting at it absorbedly, “Coleman has a crush on you, all right, and he’d rather be with you than anyone else—–­”

Yes,” nodded Susan.  “I know that, because—–­”

“Well.  But you see you’re so fixed that you can’t entertain him here, Sue, and you don’t run in his crowd, so when he wants to see you he has to go out of his way to do it.  So his rushing you doesn’t mean as much as it otherwise would.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Susan said, with a sinking heart.

“The chances are that he doesn’t want to get married at all yet,” pursued Billy, mercilessly, “and he thinks that if he gives you a good time, and doesn’t—­doesn’t go any further, that he’s playing fair.”

“That’s what I think,” Susan said, fighting a sensation of sickness.  Her heart was a cold weight, she hoped that she was not going to cry.

“But all the same, Sue,” Billy resumed more briskly, “You can see that it wouldn’t take much to bring an affair like that to a finish.  Coleman’s rich, he can marry if he pleases, and he wants what he wants—–­You couldn’t just stop short, I suppose?  You couldn’t simply turn down all his invitations, and refuse everything?” he broke off to ask.