FROM THE LIFE
pretty," he said, "but she wasn't like any girl I'd ever met before. She was so quiet. She'd just stand and watch you, and listen and look—look friendly, and never say a word. I was dead nuts about her in no time. I used to take all sorts of things in my pocket for her, and she'd slip out and get them when she heard me chopping wood. I used to make all the noise I could on purpose, and bang on the side of the woodshed when she didn't come.
"I don't know how she let me know—I guess she told me straight out—that she couldn't speak to me if she saw me on the street. I didn't care, but I pretended I was sore. I had some Scotch shortcake for her, but I said I wouldn't give it to her unless she let me kiss her. She said she wouldn't do it for the shortcake, but she'd do it because she couldn't speak to me on the street. It was the—the first time I kissed her." And then he began to sob again.
He must have been about eight years old at the time, and she ten. Her father had come to New York for an English publishing-house. He was an Oxford man and a younger son; he had not yet developed his destructive weakness for brandy and soda, and, although his income must have been beggarly, the family kept up appearances. She did not go to school; she was taught at home by her mother. And she was not allowed to associate with the neighborhood children because their accents were bad. There was, in fact, no accent in
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