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“Why should you be cast down, Kit?” asked Joan with her motherly young smile. “I always think of you as the Fortunate Youth, like Harry Warrington.”

“Say, Joan, that’s a better hit than you aimed to make!” cried Kit. “Harry Warrington wasn’t all around fortunate, and when he’d ceased to be a youth he must have been conscious of what he’d missed.”

Joan had a glimmer of a suspicion of the true cause of Kit’s depression; she glanced at Anne Dallas with the light of her suspicion in her eyes, but Anne said unconsciously:

“What nice old fogies you are to be so familiar with your Thackeray! I shouldn’t catch your allusion but that I read ‛The Virginians’ to Mr. Latham quite lately. And I found Thackeray greater, even in that book, than any one else.”

“You’ll be all right, Kit; you need not worry. As long as you see straight it will be all right with you. Harry Warrington was a stupid youth,” said Joan, hedging for safety, being uncertain of her ground.

“I suspect all youths are stupid,” said Kit. “My aunt considers me so. I’ve just had a lecture on The Whole Duty of Man, and it depressed me. The great A stands for autocrat, as well as Anne.”