He talked so long and so interestingly that they were actually in front of the school before Jane realized it. There was Agnes, sitting on the front steps. She waved cheerfully at André, her funny freckled face wreathed in smiles. Agnes liked André and Agnes was never silly. She knew just how Jane felt about him and still she didn’t think that there was anything to laugh at. Out of the corner of her eye Jane could see Flora and Muriel up at the front window, pointing André out to some other girls. He saw them, too, of course, but he didn’t seem to care. André never did care if people thought things. Jane always did. She wished he’d leave her at the corner every morning, half a block from the school, but she didn’t want to tell him so. For most of all she cared what André thought. She knew André awfully well, of course, but not well enough to tell him a thing like that.
The first bell rang while he was talking with Agnes. Jane slipped her arm through hers and turned toward the door.
“See you after lunch,” said André, cap in hand. “If you could manage to come over about half-past two we could paint the first set. Mother told me to ask you to tea.”
Jane only smiled and nodded, but she walked into the study hall in a thrill of anticipation. Tea with André. His mother had asked her. She wouldn’t tell her mother. She would just go. Jane’s eyes were dancing behind her lowered eyelids as ancient Miss Milgrim read the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer over the bowed heads of the assembled school. She was almost laughing aloud as she rose for the morning hymn. Her thin little voice shrilled up to Heaven’s gates in purely secular ecstasy.
“Rejoice, ye pure in heart!
Rejoice, give thanks and sing!
Your glorious banner raise on high
The cross of Christ, your King!”
She was going to tea with André.
“Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice, give thanks and sing!”
André was waiting for her on the steps of the Saint James Apartments at half-past two. He wore a funny navy-blue beret on his sleek black hair and he was spinning a top. No other Chicago boy of sixteen ever spun a top and Jane had never seen any other beret. That was the kind of thing that André did that made Flora and Muriel think that he was sissy. Jane wished he wouldn’t. She liked to spin tops herself and the beret was most becoming. Still, there was no sense in willfully laying yourself open to mockery. Flora and Muriel had no idea how nice André really was.
They went upstairs in the elevator and André’s mother opened the front door. André’s mother had only one servant and that one was often out. The children entered the little crowded living-room. There were lots of books in it, filling the walls from floor to ceiling. Not nice volumes in neat, uniform sets of sombre leather, as in Jane’s own father’s library or in Flora’s grandfather’s, but all sorts and sizes of books in all kinds of variegated bindings, some quite dilapidated, set haphazard on the shelves. There were some sets, of course. A long line of bound Punch, for instance, and many more Arabian Nights than Jane had ever known there were, and a red row of nearly thirty volumes by Guy de Maupassant. Jane had never heard of him.
André’s mother had been reading in the big green Morris chair in the bay window that looked down Rush Street, all the way to the river. The book still lay in the chair seat. It was a French book, called Madame Bovary. André’s mother saw Jane looking at it.
“You’ll like that book, Jane,” she said, “when you’re older.”
That was the way André’s family always spoke of books. Just as if they were people living in the world with you, nice friendly people, whom you were bound to meet some day and get on famously with when you finally knew them.
Jane followed André into his little bedroom. His paints were all set out on a table with some sheets of Bristol board.
“I saw Bernhardt do Camille in Paris, last summer,” said André eagerly, “And I remember all her sets. We can make ours just the same.”
Jane sat down beside André at the little table, feeling a little flushed and excited to think that this was really André’s very own room. She had been in it several times before, of course, but it made her feel that funny way inside every time. André was very near her, just across the paint water. He went on talking about Sarah Bernhardt most enthusiastically, but there was something about his very enthusiasm that made Jane think that perhaps he was feeling funny too. Terribly happy and excited and just a little nervous, as she was herself. But then they fell to discussing colours and later to painting and André grew lost in his work, as he always did, and Jane applauded him and was very much interested and greatly surprised when André’s mother stood in the doorway and said it was half-past four and time for tea.
Jane had never known anyone who had tea, regularly, every day, like breakfast, lunch, and dinner, except André’s family. Jane’s mother had it on Wednesdays, when lots of ladies came to call, and now that Isabel was home from school, she had it on
