Star-Dust. Fannie Hurst
one minute for that algebra quiz."
"You did so! When I went downstairs to write in my Friendship Book, like you said you were going to do, you worked your algebra instead. Roy told me."
"Well, if I was as pretty as you, Lilly, I wouldn't ever care if I got my lessons or not," said Flora, to palliate.
"Flora Kemble, I'm not pretty!"
"You are, too. Everybody says your complexion is like peaches and cream, and look at mine, all freckles."
"Complexion, huh! If I had your yellow hair, you could have all my complexion."
"Boys hate freckles because so many of them have them themselves."
"Always boys. Honestly, you're boy-crazy, Flora."
"Well, I like that. Can I help it if I got an invitation and you didn't?
You sat right next to him in English and I sat two whole seats away."
A cloud no larger and smudgier than a high-school boy's hand had dropped its first shadow between them. Eugene Bankhead, son of the credit man for Slocum-Hines, the city's largest wholesale hardware firm, had suddenly, out of this clear sky, invited Flora to the Thanksgiving Day football game between Center High and an exclusive local academy. A new estate felt, rather than spoken, quickened the eye and authority of Flora. A sense of it rode on the air waves between them.
"I hate boys."
"How do you know? You've never seen any except my brother and sneak-thief Harry."
"Papa says if a girl begins to run around with boys too soon it makes her so forward that by the time she's eighteen she's too old and faded—"
"That's old-fogy talk."
"You mean it's old fogy for girls to let boys jam everything else out of their heads. I'd like to see the boy that could make me forget my—my ambitions."
"If Eugene had asked you instead of me you wouldn't be saying that."
"Anyway, I hate snips. I like men—real men."
"Oh, I know. You're stuck on Lindsley!"
A violent splash of red and a highly superlative denial of word and manner laid hold of Lilly.
"Why, Flora Kemble!"
"Look at her blushing. Oh, what I know about you!"
"You fibber. I think he's the limit. I never saw a fellow so stuck on himself."
"Oh, I know! I know now why you carry home twice as many books as you used to since he got charge of the library."
"I'm reading the Lady of the Lake and you know it. That's why I stopped in to-night."
"I know why you're always writing compositions since you have him in
English. Lilly's stuck on Lindsley."
Tears were rare with Lilly, but a tremor waved her voice.
"I think you're horrid, Flora Kemble. Anyway, he's more worth while being stuck on than Eugene Bankhead. He's just—just middle-class. His future is to work in Slocum-Hines's hardware store, like his father."
"Well, that's more of a man's job than sitting around in a schoolroom doing lady's work. Papa says Eugene's father is a five-thousand-a-year man. Eugene has all the spending money he wants and they have a conservatory in their house."
"Well, I'd rather be Lindsley than Eugene; besides, he's a kid hardly out of short trousers."
"Silly, you don't think it's Eugene I'm stuck on, do you? His brother Vincent is a big man down at Slocum-Hines's, too, and a catch. I'm going to meet him some day. Lindsley! Ugh! I like a little sponduliks thrown in with a fellow. Lindsley's elbows shine."
For the most part the Board of Education drew upon the offspring of its own system for teaching talent, occasionally letting in an artery of new blood. Lilly's second year in High School such an infusion took place in the form of one H. Horace Lindsley, the young master of arts, his degree rather heavy upon him, dawning blondly and behind high-power pince-nez upon the English department.
Sweet sixteen capitulated to English literature. The double wave of Mr. Lindsley's hair, the intellectual rush of very long, white teeth to the front, somehow mitigating for the sins of a curriculum that could present Gorboduc, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, to young minds illy furrowed for such seed.
Notwithstanding the literary odor with which Mr. Lindsley sprayed himself as he sprayed his handkerchief with a domestic scent called "Sesame and Lilies," his neoclassic determination to write the American Iliad must have died painlessly when his iambically disposed feet ventured too deeply into the quagmire of pedagogy, from which he was not to emerge. But for the first time in her life Lilly was hearing her name pronounced by one who rolled it under his tongue like a lollypop. He rolled all names quite so, but in her beatitude she was only conscious of her own as it candied. Besides, his eyes, through the pince-nez, had a gimlet, goosefleshing quality; he recited "Straits of Dover" to a class of young women with rapt adenoidal expression when he should have been inoculating them with the bitter serum of Burke's Conciliation Speech, and walked to school of wintry mornings without an overcoat; skates and the Areopagitica under his arm.
It was undeniable that at this stage Lilly had veered unaccountably to authorship, her after-school practice hour gouged into by a suddenly stimulated pen.
"Papa, I know my ambition!"
Mr. Becker let fall his newspaper to his knee, glancing up over the rim of his reading glasses.
"What's it now, daughter?"
"I want to be a writer. You know, an author of stories. My English teacher says I have talent. I get A minus on all my essays, and to-day he wrote on the edge of one, 'Quite a literary touch.'"
MRS. BECKER (who rocked as she darned): "The trouble with you, Lilly, is that you have it too good. You don't know what you want."
"You don't care if I am a writer, do you, papa?"
"Last week it was the stage, and last month the opera, and now it's writing. What next, I wonder?"
"Your mother's right. There's no stability to this art business, Lilly.
They're a loose lot that never come to a good end."
"Well, just the same," cried Lilly, hot with a sense of futility and rebellion, "your own father was the next thing to an actor. Preaching is kin to acting."
"Don't you ever let me hear you talk like that again. Your grandfather was a God-fearing, not a play-acting man." Attacking this subject, a little furrow would invariably appear between Mr. Becker's fine gray eyes and his lips express bitter intolerance for a world that translated itself to him solely in terms of pink tights.
Not that the odor of religion lay any too heavily on Lilly's youth. Sunday school was not enforced, Sabbath ethics were observed loosely, if at all, but a yearly membership in the Garrison Avenue Rock Church was maintained, not without remonstrance from Mrs. Becker.
"I don't see why we belong. If I want to attend church on Easter Sunday or a Christmas, I don't have to pay dues all year for it. A person can pray just as well at home as in church if he's inclined that way."
"Our child doesn't need to be raised like a heathen just because we aren't as regular as we might be about churchgoing. Besides, when trouble comes we don't want to be buried like heathens, either."
"Calamity howler."
"In England, papa, writers get buried in Westminster Abbey. If I lived in England, that would be my ambition."
"The child has ambitions even about funerals. I bought you goods for a navy-blue poplin to-day, Lilly. Gentle's had a sale."
"Oh, mamma, can you get Katy Stutz to come in time to make it for auditorium next Friday? Mr. Lindsley may call on me to read my essay out loud."
"That