Patience Sparhawk and her Times

One afternoon in March, Patience, glancing out of the library window, saw Hal coming up the lawn from the path that led down the slope to the station. She suppressed a war-whoop with which she and Rosita had been used to awake the echoes of the Californian hills, opened the window, and vaulted out.

"Well," cried Miss Peele, as Patience ran toward her, "you do look glad to see me, sure enough. Bev can't be very exciting, for you don't look as if it were me particularly-just somebody. Oh, matrimony! matrimony! I envy the women that have solved the problem in some other way-the journalists and artists, and authors and actresses, and even the suffragists, God rest them. Hello, there's Bev. He looks as if he were about to cry. What have you been doing to him?"