Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/76

 a character and nice middle-aged friends, and can give you a home and a social circle and clothes and things—but hasn't anything to say to you. He simply hasn't anything to say to you."

"Why do you keep hollering, 'He hasn't anything to say to you'?" mocked her brother. "Who hasn't anything to say? Who? Who? Who?"

"Shut up!" said Dorothy, with more sweetness than the words can carry. "You heard. I said, 'The good American husband has nothing to say to you.

"That is rather a defect," I assented wickedly, "if you've got to be alone with him for the rest of your life. Yes, it's a rather serious defect in a man with whom, forsaking all others, a girl of twenty expects to spend the next fifty years. But Dorothy, if you don't take a good American husband, what is the alternative?"

"Oh, a boy of your own age, of course," she answered promptly. "A boy that you like—like in all ways, I mean: like his voice, like his eyes, like the temperature of his hands—not like fins. He talks with you about the things that interest you—they are just the same as the things that interest him; and you like to do things with him; and if there is anything perfectly splendid, you wish he