This was most flattering, and he took me home to Mrs. Crasterton himself.

Edmée questioned me, but was not too persistent, as she was dressing for a ball to which Mrs. Crasterton was chaperoning her, and from which my lack both of clothes and accomplishments shut me. I said that Mr. Hardy had been too busy to bother much with me, that I had looked at a lot of books.

“But why did you stay so long?”

“I had to wait till he could bring me home.”

Gaddy was to look after me for the evening, for which I was grateful in view of the danger of Big Ears turning up on the way to the ball. Gad collected children’s books, which seemed to me a peculiar hobby for an old bachelor. He read from them. I never had had any children’s books. Ma thought them trash and I don’t believe that Pa ever heard of them.

Gad and I got on famously till half past nine, when there was a ring. “If it’s Big Ears, don’t leave me alone with him for a single moment,” I pled.

“I promise, but why, what on earth … but it can wait.”

It was Big Ears. In response to Gad’s interrogations he said that he was bored to the spine with the dance, and why had Gad not been there?

“Why, with the beauteous Edmée, that is strange, did someone cut you out?” grinned Gad.

“Why did you neglect your duty, were you lame?” demanded Big Ears. “Derek disappeared after the first dance and left her on my hands.”

“I understood that you would be after me with a gun if I did not give way,” said Gad.

“Yes, and you are so persistent that the lady is worn out.”

They both laughed. I listened in amazement to the workings of male vanity in saving face.

I excused myself and left Gad to the guest. He went early. One more night safely past. But I had a habit of running down to the sea wall to watch the sun rise over the Harbor, and Big Ears had found this out. There he was waiting for me next morning. He insisted upon bringing me up to the scratch. I would as soon have married a moon calf, whatever that may be, and thought it like his insufferability to be squawking after Edmée one week and trying to fool me the next, but I said I could not be so wicked as to drag him down to my level. “I’m a free-thinker,” I said, piling it on a little. “It is as bad for a woman to be without religion as a flower to be without perfume. That is the companion piece of love being for men a thing apart, but for women their whole existence.”

Big Ears was commended as a remarkable young man who not only taught in Sunday School, but carried on the custom of his father in reading family prayers each morning to his household. “I would laugh out loud to see you reading prayers, you’d look so funny and young,” I added.