"If you're going to act this way and deliberately persecute me," he raged, "I'll just have to have a good talk with you, my fine young lady!"
He waited, this new Tuesday, for another note of apology. There was none, but on Thursday, when he was most innocently having a vanilla milk-shake at Bombery's Drug Store, near the seminary, when he felt ever so good and benign and manly, with his Missions theme all finished and two fine five-cent cigars in his pocket, he saw her standing outside peering in at him.
He was alarmed. She looked not quite sane.
"Suppose she's told her father!" he groaned.
He hated her.
He swaggered out gallantly, and he did most magniloquently the proper delight at encountering her here in town.
"Well, well, well, Lulu, this is a pleasant surprise! And where's Papa?"
"He and Ma are up in the doctor's office—about Ma's earache. I said I'd meet them at the Boston Bazaar. Elmer!" Her voice was like stretched quivering wire. "I've got to talk to you! You've got to— Walk down the street with me."
He saw that she had tried to rouge her cheeks. It was not customary in rural Midwest in 1906. She had done it badly.
The spring was early. These first days of March were soft with buds, and Elmer sighed that if she weren't such a tyrannical nagger, he might have felt romantic about her as they walked toward the court-house lawn and the statue of General Sherman.
He had expanded her education in boldness as well as vocabulary; and with only a little hesitation, a little of peering up at him, a little of trying to hook her fingers over his arm till he shook it free, she blurted:
"We've got to do something. Because I think I'm going to have a baby."
"Oh, good God Almighty! Hell!" said the Reverend Elmer Gantry. "And I suppose you've gone squealing to your old man and the old woman!"
"No, I haven't." She was quiet, and dignified—dignified as a bedraggled gray kitten could be.
"Well, that's good, anyway. Well, I suppose I'll have to do something about it. Damn!"
