“Oh, yes, I did,” replied Bassett.  “I remember her very well, indeed.  I quite agree with your mother and Aunt Sally that she is an exceedingly fine girl.”

“She certainly discouraged me a good deal about college.  Four years of school after you’re seventeen or eighteen!  Not for Marian!” and she shook her head drolly.

Bassett was either absorbed in thought or he chose to ignore Marian’s remark.  He was silent for some time, and the girl went on banteringly with Harwood.  She availed herself of all those immunities and privileges which the gods confer upon young women whom they endow with good looks.  In the half-freedom of the past year she had bought her own clothes, with only the nominal supervision of Miss Waring’s assistant; and in her new spring raiment she was very much the young lady, and decidedly a modish one.  Dan glanced from her to the young people at a neighboring table.  Among the girls in the party none was prettier or more charmingly gowned than Marian.  In the light of this proximity he watched her with a new attention, and he saw that her father, too, studied her covertly, as though realizing that he had a grown daughter on his hands.  Her way with Harwood was not without coquetry; she tapped his arm with her fan lightly when he refused to enter into a discussion of his attentions, of which she protested she knew much, to Miss Bosworth.  He admitted having called on Miss Bosworth once; her brother was a Yale man, and had asked him to the house on the score of that tie; but Marian knew much better.  She was sure that he was devoting himself to Miss Bosworth; every one said that he was becoming a great society man.

She had wearied of his big-brother attitude toward her.  Except the callow youth of Fraserville and the boys she had known all the summers of her life at Waupegan, Harwood and Allen Thatcher were the only young men she knew.  In her later freedom at school she had made the office telephone a nuisance to him, but he sympathized with her discreetly in her perplexities.  Several times she had appealed to him to help her out of financial difficulties, confiding to him tragically that if certain bills reached Fraserville she would be ruined forever.

Marian found the Country Club highly diverting; it gave her visions of the social life of the capital of which she had only vaguely dreamed.  She knew many people by sight who were socially prominent, and she longed to be of their number.  It pleased her to find that her father, who was a non-resident member and a rare visitor at the club, attracted a good deal of attention; she liked to think him a celebrity.  The Speaker of the House in the last session of the general assembly came out and asked Bassett to meet some men with whom he had been dining in the rathskeller; while her father was away, Marian, with elbows resting on the table, her firm, round chin touching her lightly interlaced fingers, gave a capital imitation of a