I don't want--I--" He rose, still incoherent.

"I prefer--I want--Please excuse me!" He left the room, and a moment later the screens outside the open front door were heard to slam: "Fanny! You shouldn't--" "Isabel, don't reproach me, he did have plenty of dinner, and I only told the truth: everybody has been saying--" "But there isn't any truth in it." "We don't actually know there isn't," Miss Fanny insisted, giggling.
"We've never asked Lucy." "I wouldn't ask her anything so absurd!" "George would," George's father remarked.

"That's what he's gone to do." Mr.Minafer was not mistaken: that was what his son had gone to do.

Lucy and her father were just rising from their dinner table when the stirred youth arrived at the front door of the new house.

It was a cottage, however, rather than a house; and Lucy had taken a free hand with the architect, achieving results in white and green, outside, and white and blue, inside, to such effect of youth and daintiness that her father complained of "too much spring-time!" The whole place, including his own bedroom, was a young damsel's boudoir, he said, so that nowhere could he smoke a cigar without feeling like a ruffian.