A moody Maurice, who puzzled her, and a faultfinding Eleanor, whom she
was too generous to understand, drove the sixteen-year-old Edith into a
real appreciation of Johnny Bennett. With him, she was still in the
stage of unsentimental frankness that pierced ruthlessly to what she
conceived to be the realities; and because she was as unselfconscious as
a tree, she was entirely indifferent to the fact that Johnny was a boy
and she was a girl, Johnny, however, nearsighted and in enormous
shell-rimmed spectacles, and still inarticulate, was quite aware of it;
more definitely so every week,--for he saw her on Saturdays and Sundays.
"And it's the greatest possible relief to talk to you!" Edith told him.
Johnny accepted the tribute as his due. They had been coasting, and now,
on the hilltop, were sitting on their sleds, resting. "Gosh! it's hot!"
Johnny said: he had taken off his red sweater and tied its sleeves
around his neck; "zero? You try pulling both those sleds up here, and
you'll think it's the Fourth of July," Johnny said, adjusting his
spectacles with a mittened hand. He frequently reverted to the grumpy
stage--yet now, looking at Edith, grumpiness vanished. She was
breathless from the long climb, and her white teeth showed between her
parted, panting lips: her cheeks were burning with frosty pink. Johnny
looked, and looked away, and sighed.
"Johnny," Edith said, "why do you suppose Eleanor gives me so many
call-downs? 'Course I hate music; and once I said she was always
pounding on the piano--and she didn't seem to like it!" Edith was
genuinely puzzled. "I can't understand Eleanor," she said; "she makes me
tired."
"I should think she'd make Maurice tired!" Johnny said, and added:
"That's the worst of getting married. I shall never marry."
"When I was a child," Edith said, "I always said that when I grew up I
was going to marry Maurice, because he was just like Sir Walter Raleigh.
Wasn't that a joke?"
Johnny saw nothing amusing in such foolishness; he said that Maurice was
old enough to be her father! As for himself, he felt, he said, that
marriage was a mistake. "Women hamper a man dreadfully. Still--I may
marry," Johnny conceded; "but it will be somebody very young, so I can
train her mind. I want a woman (if I decide to marry) to be just the
kind I want. Otherwise, you get hung up with Eleanors."
Edith lifted her chin. "Well, I like that! Why shouldn't she train your
mind?"
"Because," Johnny said, firmly, "the man's mind is the stronger."
Edith screamed with laughter, and threw a handful of snow in his neck.
"B-r-r-r!" she said; "it's getting cold! I'll knock the spots out of you
on belly bumps!" She got on her feet, shook the snow from the edge of
her skirt, flung herself face down on her sled, and shot like a blue
comet over the icy slope. Johnny sped after her, his big sled taking
flying leaps over the kiss-me-quicks. They reached the bottom of the
hill almost together, and Johnny, looking at her standing there,
breathless and rosy, with shining eyes which were as impersonal as
stars, said to himself, with emotion:
"She's got sense--for a girl." His heart was pounding in his broad
chest, but he couldn't think of a thing to say. He was still dumb when
she said good-by to him at Maurice's door.
"Why don't you come to dinner next Saturday?" she said, carelessly;
"Maurice will be away all week on business; but he'll be back Saturday."
Johnny mumbled something to the effect that he could survive, even if
Maurice wasn't back.
"I couldn't," Edith said. "I should simply die, in this house, if it
wasn't for Maurice!"
As, whistling, she ran upstairs, Edith thought to herself that Johnny
was a _lamb_! "But, compared to Maurice, he's awfully uninteresting."
Edith, openly and audibly, compared every male creature to Maurice, and
none of them ever measured up to him! His very moodiness had its charm;
when he sat down at the piano after dinner and scowled over some new
music, or when he lounged in his big chair and smoked, his face absorbed
to the point of sternness, Edith, loving him "next to father and
mother," watched him, and wondered what he was thinking about? Sometimes
he came out of his abstraction and teased her, and then she sparkled
into gay impertinences; sometimes he asked her what she thought of this
or that phrasing, "...though you are a barbarian, Skeezics, about
music"; sometimes he would pull a book from the shelf over his
desk and read a poem to her; and he was really interested in her
opinion,--ardently appreciative if he liked the poem; if he didn't, it
was "the limit."
Maurice was at home that Saturday night for which Edith had thrown the
careless invitation to Johnny; and Mrs. Newbolt also dropped in to
dinner. It was not a pleasant dinner. Eleanor sat in one of her empty
silences; saw Maurice frown at an overdone leg of lamb; heard her aunt's
stream of comments on her housekeeping; listened to Edith's teasing
chatter to Johnny;--"What _can_ Maurice see in her!" She thought.
Before dinner was over, she excused herself; she had a headache, she
said. "You won't mind, Auntie, will you?"
Mrs. Newbolt said, heartily, "_Not_ a bit! My dear mother used to--"
Eleanor, picking up little Bingo, went with lagging step out of the
room.
"Children," said Mrs. Newbolt, "why don't you make taffy this evening?"
"_That's_ sense," said Edith; "let's! It's Mary's night out. Sorry poor
old Eleanor isn't up to it."
Maurice frowned; "Look here, Edith, that isn't--respectful."
Edith looked so blankly astonished that Mrs. Newbolt defended her: "But
Eleanor _does_ look old! And she'll lose her figger if she isn't
careful! My dear grandmother--used to say, 'Girls, I'd rather have you
lose your vir--'"
"Don't raise Cain in the kitchen, you two," Maurice said, hastily;
"Eleanor hates noise."
Edith, subdued by his rebuke, said she wouldn't raise Cain; and, indeed,
she and Johnny were preternaturally quiet until things had been cleared
away and the taffy could be started. When it was on the stove, there was
at least ten minutes of whispering while they watched the black molasses
shimmer into the first yellow rings. Then Johnny, in a low voice, talked
for a good while of something he called "Philosophy"--which seemed to
consist in a profound disbelief in everything. "Take religion," said
Johnny. "I'd like to discuss it with you; I think you have a very good
mind--for a woman. Religion is an illustration of what I mean. It's a
delusion. A complete delusion. I have ceased to believe in anything."
"Oh, Johnny, how awful!" said Edith, stirring the seething sweetness;
"Johnny, be a lamb, and get me a tumbler of cold water, will you, to try
this stuff?"
Johnny brought the water ("Oh, how young she is!" he thought), and Edith
poured a trickle of taffy into it.
"Is it done?" Edith said, and held out the brittle string of candy; he
bit at it, and said he guessed so. Then they poured the foamy stuff into
a pan, and put it in the refrigerator. "We'll wait till it gets stiff,"
said Edith.
"I think," said Johnny, in a low voice, "your hair is handsomer than
most women's. I'm particular about a woman's hair."
Edith, sitting on the edge of the table, displaying very pretty ankles,
put an appraising hand over the brown braids that were wound around her
head in a sort of fillet. "Are you?" she said, and began to yawn--but
stopped short, her mouth still open, for Johnny Bennett was _looking at
her_! "Let's go into the library," she said, hurriedly.
"I like it out here," Johnny objected.
But as he spoke Maurice lounged into the kitchen. "Stiff?" he said.
"No; won't be for ages," Edith said--and instantly the desire to fly to
the library ceased, especially as Mrs. Newbolt came trundling in. With
Maurice astride one of the wooden chairs, his blue eyes droll and
teasing, and Mrs. Newbolt enthroned in adipose good nature close to the
stove, Edith was perfectly willing to stay in the kitchen!
"I say!" Maurice said. "Let's pull the stuff!"
Johnny looked cross. "What," he asked himself, "are Maurice and Mrs.
Newbolt butting in for?" Then he softened, for Maurice was teasing
Edith, and Mrs. Newbolt was tasting the candy, and the next minute all
was in delightful uproar of stickiness and excitement, and Johnny,
exploding into wild cackles of laughter, felt quite young for the next
hour.
Eleanor, upstairs, with Bingo's little silken head on her breast, did
not feel young; she heard the noise, and smelled the boiling molasses,
and knew that Mary would be cross when she came home and found the
kitchen in a mess. "How can Maurice stand such childishness!" She lay
there with a cologne-soaked handkerchief on her forehead, and sighed
with pain. "Why _doesn't_ he stop them?" she thought. She heard his
shout of laughter, and Edith's screaming giggle, and moved her head to
find a cool place on the pillow. "She's too old to romp with him."
Suddenly she sat up, tense and listening; he was enjoying himself--and
she was suffering! "If he had a headache, I would sit with him; I
wouldn't leave him alone!" But she was sick in bed,--and he was having a
good time--_with Edith_. Her resentment was not exactly jealousy; it was
fear; the same fear she had felt when Maurice had told her how Edith
had rushed into his room the night of the great storm, _the fear of
Youth_! She moved Bingo gently, stroking him until he seemed to be
asleep; then sat up, and put her feet on the floor. The folded
handkerchief slipped from her forehead, and she pressed her hands
against her temples. "I'm going downstairs," she said to herself; "I
won't be left out!" She felt a sick qualm as she got on to her feet, and
went over to look at herself in the mirror ... her face was pale, and
her hair, wet with cologne, was pasted down in straggling locks on her
forehead; she tried to smooth it. "Oh, I look old enough to be--his
aunt," she said, hopelessly. When she opened her door she heard a little
thud behind her; it was Bingo, scrambling off the bed to follow her; as
she went downstairs, unsteadily, and clinging to the banisters, he
stepped on her skirt, so she had to stoop and pick him up. At the closed
kitchen door she paused for a moment, leaning against the wall; her head
swam. Bingo, held in one trembling arm, put out his little pink tongue
and licked her cheek. "I _won't_ be left out," she said again. Just as
her hand touched the knob there was an outburst of joyous yells, and a
_whack_! as a lump of taffy, flung by one of the roisterers, hit the
resounding panel of the door--then Mrs. Newbolt's fat chuckle, and
Johnny's voice vociferating that Edith was the limit, and
Maurice--"Edith, if you put that stuff in my hair, I'll skin you alive!"
"Boil her in oil!" yelled Johnny.
Eleanor turned around and crept back to the stairs; she caught at the
newel post, and stood, gasping; then, somehow, she climbed up to her
room. There, lifting Bingo into his basket, she sank on her bed, groping
blindly for the damp handkerchief to put across her forehead. "Mary will
give notice," she said. After a while, as the throbbing grew less acute,
she said, "He's their age." Bingo, crawling out of his basket, scrabbled
up on to the bed; she felt his little loving cold nose against her face.