Mimi went to her room after Hilda had gone, and lay across the bed for a long time in deep thought. Hilda was a silly little goose for her anxiety, she thought, but she must care a great deal more about Carl than she, Mimi, had ever dreamed of. She determined to see Carl, tell him as much as was necessary about Hilda’s affection for him, and then refuse to see or go out with Carl herself. It was little enough for her to do for Hilda who had been so loyal a friend. And it would be a service, too, for Hilda’s shyness would prevent her from ever indicating to Carl that she cared for him. She herself would hate to break off the companionship with Carl which had come to mean so much to them both and from which she had derived so much. His alert mind appealed to her, the reading he had done and the eager, lovable way in which he rushed to share with her anything he had come across in his reading which he thought would interest her, his keen interest in things other than those right under his nose, his quick and unforetellable changes of mood, at one minute happy and carefree and an excellent companion, at another changing abruptly to a serious-minded, at times morose and dissatisfied individual. With a woman’s love for the unusual, the unstable, the unforeseen, she was attracted by these various moods. She had grown tired of most of the other boys of her acquaintance, for she could tell in advance, almost to the exact words, what each of them would say under any given circumstance. She had never had this feeling with Carl and he seemed to be possessed of an unending and never uninteresting variety of humours, most of them of mercurial state.
But with all these varied characteristics there was among them nothing which even remotely resembled a tendency to become mushily sentimental. Here, too, he was different from the others. Mimi had learned on several unpleasant occasions the proneness of the youth she