I am old enough to speak for myself, and I am my own master.

Your mother has been very kind to me,--so kind that it doesn't seem quite right to deceive her,--and when I tell her that I love you, and that I want you to be my wife, I believe she will give us her blessing." Susy uttered a strange little laugh, and with an assumption of coyness, that was, however, still affected, stooped to pick a few berries from a manzanita bush.
"I'll tell you what she'll say, Clarence.

She'll say you're frightfully young, and so you are!" The young fellow tried to echo the laugh, but felt as if he had received a blow.

For the first time he was conscious of the truth: this girl, whom he had fondly regarded as a child, had already passed him in the race; she had become a woman before he was yet a man, and now stood before him, maturer in her knowledge, and older in her understanding, of herself and of him.

This was the change that had perplexed him; this was the presence that had come between them,--a Susy he had never known before.
She laughed at his changed expression, and then swung herself easily to a sitting posture on the low projecting branch of a hemlock.