But keep your heart open, and other
things will come."
"Perhaps when I get to be twenty-four years old and as big as you are I
can talk that way, and believe it, too. But just now I'm only a girl
that doesn't believe she's grown up, even if they do tell her so, and
tell her she mustn't be a playmate any longer. And you are not to ride
with me any more, and you are not to come to my house nor may I come to
yours. That's what they say. What are we to do, then?"
She cried her question passionately. He had no answer ready. Platitudes
would not do for this child, he reflected, and to lecture her then even
on the A B C's of the social code would be wounding her ingenuous faith.
"If this is the way it all turns out, and I can't have your friendship
any longer, what is it that you're going to do or I'm going to do?" she
insisted. "That's losing too much, just because one is grown up."
Tenderness surged in his heart toward this motherless girl--tenderness
in which there was a new quality. But he had no answer for her just
then.
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