In five years I'll be eighteen.

I expect to marry you at eighteen.

You promised." "Sure thing," admitted Boots; "I've bought the house, you know." "I know it," said the child gravely.
Boots looked down at her; she smiled and laid her head, with its clustering curls, against his shoulder, watching the game below with the quiet composure of possession.
Their relations, hers and Lansing's, afforded infinite amusement to the Gerards.

It had been a desperate case from the very first; and the child took it so seriously, and considered her claim on Boots so absolute, that neither that young man nor anybody else dared make a jest of the affair within her hearing.
From a dimple-kneed, despotic, strenuous youngster, ruling the nursery with a small hand of iron, in half a year Drina had grown into a rather slim, long-legged, coolly active child; and though her hair had not been put up, her skirts had been lowered, and shoes and stockings substituted for half-hose and sandals.
Weighted with this new dignity she had put away dolls, officially.
Unofficially she still dressed, caressed, forgave, or spanked Rosalinda and Beatrice--but she excluded the younger children from the nursery when she did it.
However, the inborn necessity for mimicry and romance remained; and she satisfied it by writing stories--marvellous ones--which she read to Boots.

Otherwise she was the same active, sociable, wholesome, intelligent child, charmingly casual and inconsistent; and the list of her youthful admirers at dancing-school and parties required the alphabetical classification of Mr.Lansing.
But Boots was her own particular possession; he was her chattel, her thing; and he and other people knew that it was no light affair to meddle with the personal property of Drina Gerard.
Her curly head resting against his arm, she was now planning his future movements for the day: "You may do what you please while I'm having French," she said graciously; "after that we will go fishing in Brier Water; then I'll come home to practice, while you sit on the veranda and listen; then I'll take you on at tennis, and by that time the horses will be brought around and we'll ride to the Falcon.