“MONSIEUR DE ST. VIDAL is ringing the doorbell,” called Ellen, “why don’t you open the door, Marion? I believe he has a birthday present for you in his hand.”

It was my sixteenth birthday, and Monsieur de St. Vidal was my first beau! He was a relative of our neighbors, the Prefontaines, and I liked him pretty well. I think I chiefly liked to be taken about in his stylish little dogcart. I felt sure all the other girls envied me.

“You go, Ellen, while I change my dress.”

I was anxious to appear at my best before St. Vidal. It was very exciting, this having a beau. I would have enjoyed it much more, however, but for the interfering inquisitiveness of my sisters, Ada and Ellen, who never failed to ask me each time I had been out with him, whether he had “proposed” yet or not.

Ellen was running up the stairs, and now she burst into our room excitedly, with a package in her hand.

“Look, Marion! Here’s your present. He wouldn’t stop—just left it, and he said, with such a Frenchy bow—whew! I don’t like the French!—‘Pour Mamselle Marion, avec mes compliments!’” and Ellen mimicked St. Vidal’s best French manner and voice.

I opened the package. Oh, such a lovely box of paints—a perfect treasure!

“Just exactly what I wanted!” I cried excitedly, looking at the little tubes, all shiny and clean, and the new brushes and palette.

Ada was sitting reading by the window, and now she looked up and said:

“Oh, did that French wine merchant give that to Marion?”

She cast a disparaging glance at the box, and then, addressing Ellen, she continued:

“Marion is disgustingly old for sixteen, but, of course, if he gives her presents” (he had never given me anything but candy before) “he will propose to her, I suppose. Mama married at sixteen, and I suppose some people—” Ada gave me another look that was anything but approving—“are in a hurry to get married. I shall never marry till I am twenty-five!” Ada was twenty.

This time, Ellen, who was eighteen, got the condemning look. Ellen was engaged to be married to an American editor, who wrote to her every day in the week and sometimes telegraphed. They were awfully in love with each other. Ellen said now:

“Oh, he’ll propose all right. Wallace came around a whole lot, you know, before he actually popped.”

“Well, maybe so,” said Ada, “but I think we ought to know that French wine merchant’s intentions pretty soon. I’ll ask him if you like,” she volunteered.

“No, no, don’t you dare!” I protested.

“Well,” said Ada, “if he doesn’t propose to you soon, you ought to stop going out with him. It’s bad form.”

I wished my sisters wouldn’t interfere in my affairs. They nagged me everlastingly about St. Vidal, and it made me conscious when I was with him. They acted like self-appointed monitors. The minute I would get in, they would begin:

“Well, did he propose?” and I would feel ashamed to be obliged to admit, each time, that he had not. Ada had even made some suggestions of how I might “bring him to the point.” She said men had to be led along like sheep. Ellen, however, had warmly vetoed those suggestions, declaring stoutly that Wallace, her sweetheart, had needed no prodding. In fact, he had most eloquently and urgently pleaded his own suit, without Ellen “putting out a finger” to help him, so she said.

That evening St. Vidal called and took me to the rink, and I enjoyed myself hugely. He was a graceful skater, and so was I, and I felt sure that everyone’s eye was upon us. I was very proud of my “beau,” and I secretly wished that he was blond. I did prefer the English type. However, conscious of what was expected of me by my sisters, I smiled my sweetest on St. Vidal, and by the time we started for home, I realized, with a thrill of anticipation, that he was in an especially tender mood. He helped me along the street carefully and gallantly.

It was a clear, frosty night, and the snow was piled up as high as our heads on each side of the sidewalks. Suddenly St. Vidal stopped, and drawing my hand through his arm, he began, with his walking stick, to write upon the snow:

“Madame Marion de St. Vida—”

Before he got to the “l,” I was seized with panic. I jerked my hand from his arm, took to my heels and ran all the way home.

Now it had come—that proposal, and I did not want it. It filled me with embarrassment and fright. When I got home, I burst into Ada’s room, and gasped:

“It’s done! He did propose! B-but I said—I said—” I hadn’t said anything at all.

“Well?” demanded Ada.

“Why, I’m not going to, that’s all,” I said.

Ada returned to the plaiting of her hair. Then she said sceptically:

“Hm, that’s very queer. Are you sure he proposed, because I heard he was all the time engaged to a girl in CÔte des Neiges.”

“Oh, Ada,” I cried, “do you suppose he’s a bigamist? I think I’m fortunate to have escaped from his snare!”

The next day Madame Prefontaine told mama that St. Vidal had said he couldn’t imagine what in the world I had run away suddenly from him like that for, and he said:

“Maybe she had a stomach ache.”