The next morning Ramsey came into his father's room while Mr. Milholland
was shaving, an hour before church time, and it became apparent that the
son had someting on his mind, though for a while he said nothing.
“Did you want anything, Ramsey?”
“Well--”
“Didn't want to borrow my razors?”
“No, sir.”
Mr. Milholland chuckled. “I hardly supposed so, seriously! Shaving is
a great nuisance and the longer you keep away from it, the better. And
when you do, you let my razors alone, young feller!”
“Yes, sir.” (Mr. Milholland's razors were safe, Ramsey had already
achieved one of his own, but he practised the art in secret.) He passed
his hand thoughtfully over his cheeks, and traces of white powder were
left upon his fingers, whereupon he wiped his hand surreptitiously, and
stood irresolutely waiting.
“What is it you really want, Ramsey?”
“I guess I don't want anything.”
“Money?”
“No, sir. You gay' me some Friday.”
Mr. Milholland turned from his mirror and looked over the edge of a
towel at his son. In the boy's eyes there was such a dumb agony of
interrogation that the father was a little startled.
“Why, what is it, Ramsey? Have you--” He paused, frowning and wondering.
“You haven't been getting into some mess you want to tell me about, have
you?”
“No, sir.”
His tone was meek, but a mute distress lurked within it, bringing to the
father's mind disturbing suspicions, and foreshadowings of indignation
and of pity. “See here, Ramsey,” he said, “if there's anything you want
to ask me, or to tell me, you'd better out with it and get it over. Now,
what is it?”
“Well--it isn't anything.”
“Are you _sure?_”
Ramsey's eyes fell before the severe and piercing gaze of his father.
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Milholland shook his head doubtfully; then, as his son walked slowly
out of the room, he turned to complete his toilet in a somewhat uneasy
frame of mind. Ramsey had undoubtedly wanted to say something to him and
the boy's expression had shown that the matter in question was serious,
distressing, and, it might be, even critical.
In fact it was--to Ramsey. Having begun within only the last few hours
to regard haberdashery as of vital importance, and believing his father
to be possessed of the experience and authority lacking in himself,
Ramsey had come to get him to settle a question which had been upsetting
him badly, in his own room, since breakfast. What he wanted to know was:
Whether it was right to wear an extra handkerchief showing out of the
coat breast pocket or not, and, if it was right--ought the handkerchief
to have a coloured border or to be plain white? But he had never before
brought any such perplexities to his father, and found himself too
diffident to set them forth.
However, when he left the house, a few minutes later, he boldly showed
an inch of purple border above the pocket; then, as he was himself about
to encounter several old lady pedestrians, he blushed and thrust the
handkerchief down into deep concealment. Having gone a block farther, he
pulled it up again; and so continued to operate this badge of fashion,
or unfashion, throughout the morning; and suffered a great deal thereby.
Meantime, his father, rather relieved that Ramsey had not told his
secret, whatever it was, dismissed the episode from his mind and joined
Mrs. Milholland at the front door, ready for church.
“Where's Ramsey?” he asked.
“He's gone ahead,” she answered, buttoning her gloves as they went
along. “I heard the door quite a little while ago. Perhaps he went over
to walk down with Charlotte and Vance. Did you notice how neat he looks
this morning?”
“Why, no, I didn't; not particularly. Does he?”
“I never saw anything like it before,” said Mrs. Milholland. “He went
down in the cellar and polished his own shoes.”
“What!”
“For about an hour, I think,” she said, as one remaining calm before a
miracle. “And he only has three neckties, but I saw him several times in
each of them. He must have kept changing and changing. I wonder--” She
paused.
“I'm glad he's begun to take a little care of his appearance at last.
Business men think a good deal about that, these days, when he comes to
make his start in the world. I'll have to take a look at him and give
him a word of praise. I suppose he'll be in the pew when we get there.”
But Ramsey wasn't in the pew; and Charlotte, his sister, and her
husband, who were there, said they hadn't seen anything of him. It was
not until the members of the family were on their way home after the
services that they caught a glimpse of him.
They were passing a church a little distance from their own; here the
congregation was just emerging to the open, and among the sedate throng
descending the broad stone steps appeared an accompanied Ramsey--and a
red, red Ramsey he was when he beheld his father and mother and sister
and brother-in-law staring up at him from the pavement below. They were
kind enough not to come to an absolute halt, but passed slowly on, so
that he was just able to avoid parading up the street in front of
them. The expressions of his father, mother, and sister were of a
dumfoundedness painful to bear, while such lurking jocosity as that
apparent all over his brother-in-law no dignified man should either
exhibit or be called upon to ignore.
In hoarse whispers, Mrs. Milholland chided her husband for an
exclamation he had uttered. “John! On Sunday! You ought to be ashamed.”
“I couldn't help it,” he exclaimed. “Who on earth is his clinging vine?
Why, she's got _lavender_ tops on her shoes and--”
“Don't look round!” she warned him sharply. “Don't--”
“Well, what's he doing at a Baptist church? What's he fidgeting at his
handkerchief about? Why can't he walk like people? Does he think it's
obligatory to walk home from church anchored arm-in-arm like Swedes on a
Sunday Out? Who _is_ this cow-eyed fat girl that's got him, anyhow?”
“Hush! Don't look round again, John.”
“Never fear!” said her husband, having disobeyed. “They've turned off;
they're crossing over to Bullard Street. Who is it?”
“I think her name's Rust,” Mrs. Milholland informed him. “I don't know
what her father does. She's one of the girls in his class at school.”
“Well, that's just like a boy; pick out some putty-faced flirt to take
to church!”
“Oh, she's quite pretty--in that way!” said his wife, deprecatingly. “Of
course that's the danger with public schools. It would be pleasanter if
he'd taken a fancy to someone whose family belongs to our own circle.”
“'Taken a fancy'!” he echoed, hooting. “Why, he's terrible! He looked
like a red-gilled goldfish that's flopped itself out of the bowl. Why,
he--”
“I _say_ I wish if he felt that he had to take girls anywhere,” said
Mrs. Milholland, with the primmest air of speaking to the point--“if
this sort of thing _must_ begin, I wish he might have selected some
nice girl among the daughters of our own friends, like Dora Yocum, for
instance.”
Upon the spot she began to undergo the mortification of a mother who has
expected her son, just out of infancy, to look about him with the eye of
a critical matron of forty-five. Moreover, she was indiscreet enough
to express her views to Ramsey, a week later, producing thus a scene of
useless great fury and no little sound.
“I do think it's in _very_ poor taste to see so much of any one girl,
Ramsey,” she said, and, not heeding his protest that he only walked home
from school with Milla, “about every other day,” and that it didn't seem
any crime to him just to go to church with her a couple o' times, Mrs.
Milholland went on: “But if you think you really _must_ be dangling
around somebody quite this much--though what in the world you find to
_talk_ about with this funny little Milla Rust you poor father says he
really cannot see--and of course it seems very queer to us that you'd
be willing to waste so much time just now when your mind ought to be
entirely on your studies, and especially with such an absurd _looking_
little thing--
“No, you must listen, Ramsey, and let me speak now. What I meant was
that we shouldn't be _quite_ so much distressed by your being seen with
a girl who dressed in better taste and seemed to have some notion of
refinement, though of course it's only natural she _wouldn't_, with a
father who is just a sort of ward politician, I understand, and a mother
we don't know, and of course shouldn't care to. But, oh, Ramsey! if you
_had_ to make yourself so conspicuous why couldn't you be a little _bit_
more fastidious? Your father wouldn't have minded nearly so much if it
had been a self-respecting, intellectual girl. We both say that if you
_must_ be so ridiculous at your age as to persist in seeing more of one
girl than another, why, oh why, don't you go and see some really nice
girl like Dora Yocum?”
Ramsey was already dangerously distended, as an effect of the earlier
part of her discourse, and the word “fastidious” almost exploded him;
but upon the climax, “Dora Yocum,” he blew up with a shattering report
and, leaving fragments of incoherence ricocheting behind him, fled
shuddering from the house.
For the rest of the school term he walked home with Milla every
afternoon and on Sundays appeared to have become a resolute Baptist. It
was supposed (by the interested members of the high-school class) that
Ramsey and Milla were “engaged.” Ramsey sometimes rather supposed they
were himself, and the dim idea gave him a sensation partly pleasant, but
mostly apprehensive: he was afraid.
He was afraid that the day was coming when he ought to kiss her.