“Sure I will.”
Basil walked out on the veranda and approached Connie Davies.
“Goodbye,” he said. Try as he might, his voice was stiff and proud. “I had an awfully good time.”
“I’m sorry you’re leaving so early, Basil.” But she said to herself: “He’s too stuck up to have a good time. He thinks he’s wonderful.”
From the veranda he could hear Imogene’s laughter down at the end of the pier. Silently he went down the steps and along the walk to meet Bill Kampf, giving strollers a wide berth as though he felt the sight of him would diminish their pleasure.
It had been an awful night.
Ten minutes later Bill dropped him beside the waiting trolley. A few last picnickers sauntered aboard and the car bobbed and clanged through the night toward St. Paul.
Presently two young girls sitting opposite Basil began looking over at him and nudging each other, but he took no notice—he was thinking how sorry they would all be—Imogene and Margaret, Joe and Hubert and Riply.
“Look at him now!” they would say to themselves sorrowfully. “President of the United States at twenty-five! Oh, if we only hadn’t been so bad to him that night!”
He thought he was wonderful!
IV
Ermine Gilberte Labouisse Bibble was in exile. Her parents had brought her from New Orleans to Southampton in May, hoping that the active outdoor life proper to a girl of fifteen would take her thoughts from love. But North or South, a storm of sappling arrows flew about her. She was “engaged” before the first of June.
Let it not be gathered from the foregoing that the somewhat hard outlines of Miss Bibble at twenty had already begun to appear. She was of a radiant freshness; her head had reminded otherwise not illiterate young men of damp blue violets, pierced with blue windows that looked into a bright soul, with today’s new roses showing through.
She was in exile. She was going to Glacier National Park to forget. It was written that in passage she would come to Basil as a sort of initiation, turning his eyes out from himself and giving him a first dazzling glimpse into the world of love.
She saw him first as a quiet handsome boy with an air of consideration in his face, which was the mark of his recent rediscovery that others had wills as strong as his, and more power. It appeared to Minnie—as a few months back it had appeared to Margaret Torrence, like a charming sadness. At dinner he was polite to Mrs. Kampf in a courteous way that he had from his father, and he listened to Mr. Bibble’s discussion of the word “Creole” with such evident interest and appreciation that Mr. Bibble thought, “Now here’s a young boy with something to him.”
After dinner, Minnie, Basil and Bill rode into Black Bear village to the movies, and the slow diffusion of Minnie’s charm and personality presently became the charm and personality of the affair itself.
It was thus that all Minnie’s affairs for many years had a family likeness. She looked at Basil, a childish open look; then opened her eyes wider as if she had some sort of comic misgivings, and smiled—she smiled—
For all the candor of this smile, the effect—because of the special contours of Minnie’s face and independent of her mood—was sparkling invitation. Whenever it appeared Basil seemed to be suddenly inflated and borne upward, a little farther each time, only to be set down when the smile had reached a point where it must become a grin, and chose instead to melt away. It was like a drug. In a little while he wanted nothing except to watch it with a vast buoyant delight.
Then he wanted to see how close he could get to it.
There is a certain stage of an affair between young people when the presence of a third party is a stimulant. Before the second day had well begun, before Minnie and Basil had progressed beyond the point of great gross compliments about each other’s surpassing beauty and charm, both of them had begun to think about the time when they could get rid of their host, Bill Kampf.
In the late afternoon, when the first cool of the evening had come down and they were fresh and thin-feeling from swimming, they sat in a cushioned swing, piled high with pillows and shaded by the thick veranda vines; Basil put his arm around her and leaned toward her cheek and Minnie managed it that he touched her fresh lips instead. And he had always learned things quickly.
They sat there for an hour, while Bill’s voice reached them, now from the pier, now from the hall above, now from the pagoda at the end of the garden, and three saddled horses chafed their bits in the stable and all around them the bees worked faithfully among the flowers. Then Minnie reached up to reality, and they allowed themselves to be found—
“Why, we were looking for you too.”
And Basil, by simply waving his arms and wishing, floated miraculously upstairs to brush his hair for dinner.
“She certainly is a wonderful girl. Oh, gosh, she certainly is a wonderful girl!”
He mustn’t lose his head. At dinner and afterward he listened with unwavering deferential attention while Mr. Bibble talked of the boll weevil.
“But I’m boring you. You children want to go off by yourselves.”
“Not at all, Mr. Bibble. I was very interested—honestly.”
“Well, you all go on and amuse yourselves. I didn’t realize time was getting on. Nowadays it’s so seldom you meet a young man with good manners and good common sense in his head, that an old man like me is likely to go along forever.”
Bill walked down with Basil and Minnie to the end of the pier. “Hope we’ll have a good sailing tomorrow. Say, I’ve got to drive over to the village and get somebody for my crew. Do you want to come along?”
“I reckon I’ll sit here for a while and then go to
