Both girls were victims of the changing fashion in women, of an age that moved not in a stream, but in a whirlpool.
"I admire you," he said in a caressing voice, "more than I admire any one else in the world." She had been gazing into the fire, and as she turned slowly in answer to his words, it seemed to him that the blue of a summer sky shone on him from beneath the tremulous shadow of her eyelashes.
"The trouble," she replied, with an appealing glance, "is that I don't know how to be common.

There isn't any hope of a girl's being popular if she doesn't know how to be common.

I would be if I could," she confessed plaintively, "but I haven't the faintest idea how to begin." "I hope you'll never learn," he insisted.

In awakening his sympathy she had awakened also a deep-rooted protective instinct.

He felt that he longed to guard and defend her, as a brother of course, and if this newer and tenderer sentiment was the result of feminine calculation, he was too chivalrous or too inexperienced to perceive it.