“What’s your favorite color, Bill?”
“Green,” supplies a friend.
“Sh-h-h! Let him alone.”
Bill says, “Blue.”
“What’s your favorite girl’s name?”
“Mary,” says Bill.
“Mary Haupt! Bill’s got a crush on Mary Haupt!”
She was a cross-eyed girl, a familiar personification of repulsiveness.
“Who would you rather kiss than anybody?”
Across the pause a snicker stabbed the darkness.
“My mother.”
“No, but what girl?”
“Nobody.”
“That’s not fair. Forfeit! Come on, Margaret.”
“Tell the truth, Margaret.”
She told the truth and a moment later Basil looked down in surprise from his perch; he had just learned that he was her favorite boy.
“Oh, yes-s!” he exclaimed skeptically. “Oh, yes-s! How about Hubert Blair?”
He renewed a casual struggle with Riply Buckner and presently they both fell off the balustrade. The game became an inquisition into Gladys Van Schellinger’s carefully chaperoned heart.
“What’s your favorite sport?”
“Croquet.”
The admission was greeted by a mild titter.
“Favorite boy.”
“Thurston Kohler.”
A murmur of disappointment.
“Who’s he?”
“A boy in the East.”
This was manifestly an evasion.
“Who’s your favorite boy here?”
Gladys hesitated. “Basil,” she said at length.
The faces turned up to the balustrade this time were less teasing, less jocular. Basil depreciated the matter with “Oh, yes-s! Sure! Oh, yes-s!” But he had a pleasant feeling of recognition, a familiar delight.
Imogene Bissel, a dark little beauty and the most popular girl in their crowd, took Gladys’ place. The interlocutors were tired of gastronomic preferences—the first question went straight to the point.
“Imogene, have you ever kissed a boy?”
“No.” A cry of wild unbelief. “I have not!” she declared indignantly.
“Well, have you ever been kissed?”
Pink but tranquil, she nodded, adding, “I couldn’t help it.”
“Who by?”
“I won’t tell.”
“Oh‑h‑h! How about Hubert Blair?”
“What’s your favorite book, Imogene?”
“Beverly of Graustark.”
“Favorite girl?”
“Passion Johnson.”
“Who’s she?”
“Oh, just a girl at school.”
Mrs. Bissel had fortunately left the window.
“Who’s your favorite boy?”
Imogene answered steadily, “Basil Lee.”
This time an impressed silence fell. Basil was not surprised—we are never surprised at our own popularity—but he knew that these were not those ineffable girls, made up out of books and faces momentarily encountered, whose voices he had heard for a moment in Joe Gorman’s song. And when, presently, the first telephone rang inside, calling a daughter home, and the girls, chattering like birds, piled all together into Gladys Van Schellinger’s limousine, he lingered back in the shadow so as not to seem to be showing off. Then, perhaps because he nourished a vague idea that if he got to know Joe Gorman very well he would get to sing like him, he approached him and asked him to go to Lambert’s for a soda.
Joe Gorman was a tall boy with white eyebrows and a stolid face who had only recently become one of their “crowd.” He did not like Basil, who, he considered, had been “stuck up” with him last year, but he was acquisitive of useful knowledge and he was momentarily overwhelmed by Basil’s success with girls.
It was cheerful in Lambert’s, with great moths batting against the screen door and languid couples in white dresses and light suits spread about the little tables. Over their sodas, Joe proposed that Basil come home with him to spend the night; Basil’s permission was obtained over the telephone.
Passing from the gleaming store into the darkness, Basil was submerged in an unreality in which he seemed to see himself from the outside, and the pleasant events of the evening began to take on fresh importance.
Disarmed by Joe’s hospitality, he began to discuss the matter.
“That was a funny thing that happened tonight,” he said, with a disparaging little laugh.
“What was?”
“Why, all those girls saying I was their favorite boy.” The remark jarred on Joe. “It’s a funny thing,” went on Basil. “I was sort of unpopular at school for a while, because I was fresh, I guess. But the thing must be that some boys are popular with boys and some are popular with girls.”
He had put himself in Joe’s hands, but he was unconscious of it; even Joe was only aware of a certain desire to change the subject.
“When I get my car,” suggested Joe, up in his room, “we could take Imogene and Margaret and go for rides.”
“All right.”
“You could have Imogene and I’d take Margaret, or anybody I wanted. Of course I know they don’t like me as well as they do you.”
“Sure they do. It’s just because you haven’t been in our crowd very long yet.”
Joe was sensitive on that point and the remark did not please him. But Basil continued: “You ought to be more polite to the older people if you want to be popular. You didn’t say how do you do to Mrs. Bissel tonight.”
“I’m hungry,” said Joe quickly. “Let’s go down to the pantry and get something to eat.”
Clad only in their pajamas, they went downstairs. Principally to dissuade Basil from pursuing the subject, Joe began to sing in a low voice:
“Oh, you beautiful doll,
You great—big—”
But the evening, coming after the month of enforced humility at school, had been too much for Basil. He got a little awful. In the kitchen, under the impression that his advice had been asked, he broke out again:
“For instance, you oughtn’t to wear those white ties. Nobody does that that goes East to school.” Joe, a little red, turned around from the ice box and Basil felt a slight misgiving. But he pursued with: “For instance, you ought to get your family to send you East to school. It’d be a great thing for you. Especially if you want to go East to college, you ought to first go East to school. They take it out of you.”
Feeling that he had nothing special to be taken out of him, Joe found the implication distasteful. Nor did Basil appear to him at that moment to have been perfected by the process.
“Do you want cold chicken or cold ham?” They drew up chairs to the kitchen table. “Have some milk?”
“Thanks.”
Intoxicated by the three full meals he had had
