without injury to her own peace of mind.  At the end of the fourth summer she appeared on close scrutiny to be a little worn, and her innocent air seemed a trifle deliberate.  She returned to her home in New Jersey in not quite her usual spirits.  In fact she became pensive.  She had seen the world, and lo! she found it stuffed with sawdust.  She was ready to settle down, but the only man with whom she would have been willing to settle had never asked her.  He was the brother of one of the girls who had been forbidden by her mother to stay out in canoes with young men after nine at night.  The rumor had reached Flossy that this same mother had referred to her in “the fish pond” at Rodick’s as “that dreadful girl.”  It would have pleased her after that to have wrung an offer of marriage from the son and heir, who knew her cousins, the Morton Prices, and to whom she would have been willing to engage herself temporarily at all events.  He was very devoted; they stayed out in his canoe until past midnight; he wrote verses to her and told her his innermost thoughts; but he stopped there.  He went away without committing himself, and she was left to chew the cud of reflection.  It was bitter, not because she was in love with him, for she was not.  In her heart she knew he bored her a little.  But she was piqued.  Evidently he had been afraid to marry “that dreadful girl.”  She was piqued and she was sad.  She recognized that it was another case of not being fit.  When would she be fit?  What was she to do in order to become fit—­fit like the girl who was not allowed to stay on the water after nine o’clock?  She had ceased to think of the young man, but the image of his sister haunted her.  How stylish she was, yet how simple and quiet!  “I wonder,” thought Flossy to herself, “if I could ever become like her.”  The reflection threw her into a brown study in which she remained for weeks, and during which she refused the hand of a staid and respectable townsman, who, in her father’s words, was ready to take her with all her follies.  David Price was disappointed.  He loved this independent daughter, and he had hopes that her demure and reticent deportment signified that the effervescence of youth had evaporated.  But it was only an effort on Flossy’s part to imitate the young man’s sister.

At this juncture and just when she was bored and dispirited by the process, Gregory Williams appeared on the scene.  Flossy met him at a dancing party.  He had a very tall collar, a very friendly, confident, and (toward her) devoted manner, and good looks.  It was whispered among the girls that he was a banker from New York.  He was obviously not over thirty, which was young for a banker, but so he presently described himself to Flossy with hints of impending prosperity.  He spoke glibly and picturesquely.  He had a convincing eloquence of gesture—­a wave of the hand which suggested energy and compelled confidence.  He had picked her out at once to be introduced to,