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FLAMING

YOUTH

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me good to confess to you.” She grew still and pensive. “Bob, if I’d been a Roman Catholic do you suppose I’d have been—different?” “Doubted. Would you want to be?” “IT don’t really know that I would. Anyway I’m what I had to be. We all are.” “Fatalism is a convenient excuse.” “No; but I am,” she insisted. “It’s temperament. Temperament is fate.

For a woman, anyway,’ she added

with a flash of insight. ‘You don’t blame me, do you? I couldn’t help it, could 1?” He smiled down at her, tolerant but uncompromising. “Oh, don’t stand there looking like God,” she fretted. “Do you know what I’d resolved to do? Will you laugh at me if I tell you?” “Probably. Therefore tell me.” “TI was going to be a pattern of all the proprieties after I turned forty.” “Too early,” he pronounced judicially. “Why? What do you mean?” “Make it fifty.” She knit her smooth forehead. “Because I wouldn’t be pretty then?” “Oh, you’d charm and attract men at seventy. But you wouldn’t have such a—well, such an urgent temperament. That passes, usually.” “Bob! You beast!” But she laughed. “You’re very much the medical man, aren’t you?” “It’s my business in life.” “Well, the whole discussion is what you call an academic, question, anyhow. If you and your hateful medical science are right, I’ll never see thirty-eight, let alone forty, I don’t feel thirty-seven. 'There’s so much life in me. Too much, I suppose.”