Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/74

 and Oliver Junior; and their comment was less flattering.

"Bah!" exclaimed Oliver. "Let's go and have a swim. It made me sick."

"Me too," said Dorothy. "It made me cold all over to hear her promising to forsake all others and keep herself only for that wizened—stick. Why should she forsake all others, just because she is married? It sounds as if she were going as missionary to the Indians."

"Or as trained nurse to an isolation hospital," Oliver suggested.

"When I am married," said Dorothy, "I shall not forsake all others—at least, unless I get a better one than that."

"You are severe critics," I murmured, secretly delighted to observe that the children were using the dialect of their feelings, rather than that polite language which well-bred youth, like Japanese ladies, employ in presence of their elders. "At what age do you expect to be married, Dorothy?"

"I shall never marry!" she replied with a deep blush. She is of course at exactly the correct age for saying that. But if you haven't seen her, you can have no adequate notion how dire and how delicious that threat is on her lips. She inherits