"I want you to come for a drive with me in my car to-night, Doris," Mr. MacCammon said one evening. "You have taken me in yours several times and you are always so concerned with speedometers and gears that you pay no attention to my conversation. To-night you go joy-riding on my gas."
"Thank you, I shall be glad to," said Doris in her very politest manner, for to go joy-riding on some other person's gas was a great treat, and to go joy-riding on Mr. MacCammon's gas was the greatest treat of all. So she put on the charming blue motor hat--home-made out of old veils and scraps of velvet, but which, as Rosalie said, was just as flirtatious as though it had cost forty-two dollars and eighty-six cents at Marshall Field's. Mr. MacCammon helped her into the car very formally, and Rosalie from the front porch waved them away.
"Father," she said to him when the car had disappeared, "I hope your eyes have not affected your mental vision. I suppose you realize that your perfectly wonderfully philosophical psychologist or whatever he is, is quite humanly and commonplacely and every-dayly in love with your darling Doris."
"Oh, Rosalie, don't give me anything more to worry about. I do not care how perfectly wonderfully philosophical and psychological he is, he shall not come upsetting my household, that is certain."
But Mr. Artman smiled. After all, Doris was a dear girl, and Mr. MacCammon was--even more than Rosalie had said. And it was one opportunity in ten thousand, in his private opinion. And wasn't it just like Providence to give that opportunity to one of the sweet simple girls of the manse, rather than to some of the more pretentious, more expectant girls of the little town?
"What I particularly wished to say to you is this," Mr. MacCammon was saying to Doris--"if you can get your eyes off the mileage long enough to listen."
Doris turned around sidewise in the seat and snuggled back among the cushions and looked at him so directly that his mind went wandering on the instant, and they were silent a while.
"I was just wondering how old you really are. It has bothered me so long. And you need not give me the penny, I much prefer the information."
"I am thirty-six. And I was going to say this--are you planning to go to Chicago with your father?"