But alas for all my hopes. She said, on the day before we
left, while packing her jewel box:
"You might just as well give up trying to get rid of me,
Barbara. Because I do not intend to marry any one."
"Very well, Leila," I said, in a cold tone. "Of course it
matters not to me, because I can be kept in school untill I am
thirty, and never come out or have a good time, and no one will
care. But when you are an old woman and have not employed your
natural function of having children to suport you in Age, don't
say I did not warn you."
"Oh, you'll come out all right," she said, in a brutal
manner. "You'll come out like a sky rocket. You'd be as
impossable to supress as a boil."
Carter Brooks came around that afternoon and we played
marbels in the drawing room with moth balls, as the rug was up.
It was while sitting on the floor eating some candy he had
brought that I told him that there was no use hanging around, as
Leila was not going to marry. He took it bravely, and said that
he saw nothing to do but to wait for some of the younger crowd
to grow up, as the older ones had all refused him.
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