But perhaps it would be ungracious to ask her mother, after all the things that had been presented so lavishly. Still, it would have been thoughtful to have asked Arnold. It wasn’t much fun going out with a lot of old people. How could one hint about these things? But it was too late to ask Arnold now, anyway.
She wondered whether she ought to place Arnold’s picture on her dresser. There was nothing romantic between them, but Arnold was the nicest young man she had met. He had a very young sister at Miss Blagden’s School and Milly Deering had had a crush on Dorothy. The crush led to the introduction of Arnold to Dorothy, and Dorothy had introduced Arnold to the family. Arnold was about twenty-five—he looked younger, but that was because he dressed “collegiate,” as the academic nomenclature of Miss Blagden’s under-graduates had it. He was a college man, which was a guarantee of the solidity of his intellectual attainments, he danced beautifully, and he really was good-looking. Dorothy looked at the cabinet picture which he had given her at one of his early visits. It didn’t do him justice. It didn’t show the shimmer of his wavy black hair, and his interesting smile was reduced to a senseless grimace. The photographer apparently had insisted on Arnold folding his arms, which made him look stout, and he wasn’t. He was athletic-looking. A lot of girls didn’t know anybody as nice as Arnold, and he was getting along wonderfully in the firm of Emerson, Goldberg and Emerson, bankers and brokers, in which his father had an interest. And Arnold didn’t have to work! Dorothy admired him for traveling all the way to Wall Street at the far end of the city every morning when he might have stayed at home or amused himself by motoring in the country.
For a frugal grandfather had left to Arnold a complicated
[16]
