VI
BROKEN RIBS
ELSIE and Burr had been engaged nearly four years when Burr asked me, one Saturday noon, whether I could give him half an hour after luncheon up-stairs in his room. I wondered, with a slight stir of disturbance in my heart, what he wanted to speak to me about. There was the same forced cheerfulness in his manner as on the day he broke the news to me about his college degree. When he had me well established on the couch in the corner, with all his old college pillows banked up behind me, had produced his college pipe and lit it, I was sure something important was on his mind.
"I want to ask you a question, Nan," he said. "Supposing you were engaged to a man" (Burr was always supposing sweet impossibilities about me. I loved him for it. I might have been a girl of twenty), "and had been engaged quite a while," he went on slowly; "supposing that man discovered that he didn't care for you in quite the way he ought to, that slowly and gradually
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