“‘Worship without end.’” There was that in his face that made her change color.  She looked away and began to think of her own ideal.  She found that her idea of the man she loved had been of height of figure and breadth of shoulders, a handsome face and fashionable attire.  She had pictured him as tall and straight, taller than this boy and larger every way, with a straight nose, brown eyes, and dark hair.  But chiefly she had thought of the style of his clothes.  She had fancied the neckties he should wear, and the pins that should be stuck in them.  He must be brave, of course, a beautiful dancer, a fine tennis-player.  She had once thought that black-eyed, handsome young Ferdy Wickersham was as near her ideal as any one else she knew.  He led germans divinely.  But he was selfish, and she had never admired him as much as another man, who was less showy, but was, she knew, more of a man:  Norman Wentworth, a bold swimmer, a good horseman, and a leader of their set.  It suddenly occurred to her now how much more like this man Norman Wentworth was than Ferdy Wickersham, and following her thought of the two, she suddenly stepped up on a higher level and was conscious of a certain elation, much like that she had had the day she had climbed up before Gordon Keith on the out-jutting rock and looked far down over the wide expanse of forest and field, to where his home had been.

She sat for a little while in deep reflection.  Presently she said, quite gravely and a little shyly: 

“You know, I am not a bit what you think I am.  Why, you treat me as if I were a superior being.  And I am not; I am a very matter-of-fact girl.”

He interrupted her with a gesture of dissent, his eyes full of light.

“Nonsense!  You don’t know me, you don’t know men, or you would know that any girl is the superior of the best man,” he reiterated.

“You don’t know girls,” she retorted.

“I know one, at least,” he said, with a smile that spoke his admiration.

“I am not sure that you do,” she persisted, speaking slowly and very seriously.  She was gazing at him in a curious, reflective way.

“The one I know is good enough for me.”  He leaned over and shyly took her hand and raised it to his lips, then released it.  She did not resist him, but presently she said tentatively: 

“I believe I had rather be treated as I am than as something I am not.  I like you too much to want to deceive you, and I think you are deceived.”

He, of course, protested that he was not deceived.  He “knew perfectly well,” he said.  She was not convinced; but she let it go.  She did not want to quarrel with him for admiring her.

That afternoon, when Alice came in, her manner was so different from what it had been of late that her mother could not but observe it.  One moment she was distraite; the next she was impatient and even irritable; then this mood changed, and she was unusually gay; her cheeks glowed and her eyes sparkled; but even as she reflected, a change came, and she drifted away again into a brown study.