"I don't call that a proposal," calmly disagreed Gay. "He didn't ask anything. He simply took it for granted that I'd fall all over myself to accept him. Mary, what would you say to a boy, one whom you'd always known but who'd never been particularly nice to you, who would march up to you some day and say: 'You suit me better than any girl I know, and I'd like to talk over arrangements with you now. Of course we couldn't marry till a year after my graduation, but I want to have it settled before I go away, so that I'll know what to depend on. My family all tell me that it's risky business, choosing a wife with red hair, but I'm willing to take the chances.'"
"Now, Gay, you know it wasn't as bald as that," protested Roberta. "He put in all sorts of 'long and short sweetenin'.'"
"It amounted to the same thing," persisted Gay, and in answer to Mary's gasping question, "What _did_ you say?" she replied:
"I couldn't speak at first, I was so furious at his speech about red hair. But I managed to tell him several things before I finished, and nothing can be frostier and snippier than a sixteen year old girl when she tries to appear very dignified. That was my age then. The thing that made him maddest however, was that I told him that even the 'frog who would a-wooing go' knew how to go about such a matter in a much better way than he did. That he'd better wait till he was older, and amounted to something more than a mere silly boy. My snubbing almost gave him apoplexy, but it did him good in the long run."
"A proposal, and she was a year younger than I am now," thought Mary, wishing with a queer little throb of envy that she had some such experience to confess. Roberta was only nineteen now, and to judge by Gay's teasing remarks had had any number of romantic affairs. Lloyd was only fourteen when Phil first began to care so much for her.
Roberta was putting the finishing touches to her hair now, and as Mary's eyes met their wistful reflection in the mirror, she wondered if there would ever be a time when any one would care enough for her to come to her with the momentous question. She wouldn't mind so much being an old maid if she could only have some such experience to lay away in her memory, as people lay away treasures in rose-leaves and lavender. But so far she couldn't count even a susceptible youth like young Mr. Wade, or a conceited freshman like Gay's early admirer. She wanted to ask how it felt to be proposed to, and thus keep the conversation rolling along in the same interesting groove. But Roberta suddenly switched off to saddles. She was about to buy a new one, and saddles, as Roberta presented the topic, became so vastly important that Mary did not have the courage to attempt to turn the talk back to the subject of mere men.