What he perceived was simply that this lovely girl, whom he had known from infancy, had opened her heart and taken him into her confidence.

To admit that she was not a success in her small social world, proved her, he felt, to be both frank and courageous.
"Of course they don't call their way common," she pursued, with what seemed to him the most touching candour.

"Their word for it is 'pep'." She pronounced the vulgar syllable as if she abhorred it.

"That is what I haven't got, and that's why I have never been a real success in anything except church work.

Even in the Red Cross it was 'pep' that counted most, and that was the reason they never sent me to Europe.
Mother tried to make me into the kind of girl that men admired when she was young; but the type has gone out of fashion to-day just as much as crinolines or a small waist.