Skippy Bedelle Part 21

"Well that makes a difference; I thought you couldn't be," said Skippy unbending a little, "you act differently."

"Oh I see," said Mimi, who had half expected a display of sentiment, "aren't you a funny man. So you don't approve of sisters?"

She had called him a man--perhaps after all his sister had not told the age of his trousers. He straightened up and answered, "Oh, I suppose they are all right--later on."

"Jack--you _are_ a woman-hater!"

"Oh, I don't know," he said, beginning to be flattered, and he fell to wondering how he could call her Mimi, which of course was his right.

"I'll tell you a secret, but perhaps you know it already. Perhaps after all you are only making fun of me."

"Oh, I say, Mimi," he said all in a gulp and then blushed to his ears.

The young lady, noticing this, smiled to herself and continued:

"Well, if you are simply pretending, it's a very good way to get a lot of attention, but of course you know that."

"I? What? Oh, really you don't think!"

"Well, I don't know. Because of course that is what does make a man interesting. It is such a compliment when he does take notice. Now a man like Mr. Sidell who jollies every girl he meets--"

"The Egghead is a terrible fusser," said Skippy with new appreciation of his own value, "you should have seen him at the Prom."

"Did he have Cora Lantier down, the blonde girl with the big ears!"

"She was blonde but I didn't notice the ears. She was down two weeks ago."

"Oh, she was?"

Miss Lafontaine glanced backward and snuggled a little closer. Skippy began to be aware of the strangest of symptoms; at one moment he felt a rush of blood to the forehead just like the beginnings of bronchitis, the next moment his throat was swollen as though it were the mumps, yet immediately there came a weakness in his knees that could only be influenza. The warm contact of the little hand penetrated through his sleeve, the sound of her voice shut out all other sounds in his ears, and when he met her eyes his glance turned hastily away and as avidly returned.

Mimi Lafontaine at the age of nineteen knew very little of the school curriculum, but had a marked apt.i.tude for the liberal intuitive arts.

"Mimi would flirt with a clothes horse, if you flung a pair of trousers over it," a dear friend had said of her, and on the present occasion she was deriving a good deal of pleasure from the situation. The att.i.tude of a young lady of nineteen, about to emerge into society, vis-a-vis with a youngster sprouting out of his first long trousers, particularly when he happens to be the brother of a best friend, is a fairly obvious one.

There is no excitement to be derived but a certain amount of exercise. A fisherman is necessarily a man who enjoys catching fish, and if trout are not rising to the fly, sitting on the edge of the wharf and hauling in suckers is still fishing.

At the end of the afternoon Skippy was head over heels in love. If he had had the opportunity he would have trusted her with the secret of his life's ambition--the Bathtub and the Mosquito-Proof Socks. But Miss Mimi was too busy extracting information about the Triumphant Egghead (who had countered by steadfastly devoting himself to Miss Biggs) and certain sentimental chapters in the past of her best friend in which she had had a revisionary interest. These subtleties naturally were beyond the experience of Skippy, in fact he was quite unable to reason on anything.

His heart was swollen to twice its natural size, his pulse was racing, and the next moment with the wrench of the farewell, he felt in a numb despair, the light go out of the day, and a vast sinking weight rushing him down into chill regions of loneliness.

"Say Skippy, old sporting life," said Turkey Reiter, speaking over his head to the Egghead, who was in a terrific sulk, "How do you do it?"

"Do what, Turk?"

"Why, my boy, you're the quickest worker I ever saw; I thought the Egghead knew his business, but he's a babe, a suckling to you!"

"Mimi Lafontaine is the d.a.m.nedest little flirt I ever met," said the Egghead, with a slash of his whip which sent the buggy careening on two wheels.

"Hold on there!" said Turkey, grabbing the reins. "I've got to live another week. Well, Skippy, my hat's off to you, old sporting life.

You've got her feeding out of your hand. . . . And Mimi too, right under the Egghead's eye!"

"Oh, come off now, Turkey," said Skippy, to whom this light badinage was torture.

"Shucks!" said the Egghead, "you know her game."

"Well you played a pretty slick game yourself, old horse, but how did you enjoy Miss Biggs?"

"You go chase yourself," said the Egghead, flinging the remnants of a cream puff at the horse, which kept Turkey busy for the next five minutes.

Skippy scarcely heard. All he wanted was to have the drive over and to be alone with his memories. How bold he had been at the end when he had crushed her little hand in his! Had she understood--and just what had she meant when she had said,

"And so it's Jack and Mimi now, isn't it?"

That night at precisely 10.45 in his sixteenth year, hanging out of the second story window of the Kennedy, with a soul above mosquitoes, Skippy Bedelle discovered the moon.

Forty-eight hours later, Skippy suddenly realized that the hot and cold symptoms, the loss of appet.i.te, the inability to concentrate his mind on either "The Count of Monte Cristo" or "Lorna Doone," the hardness of his bed, the length of the day were not due to either German measles or the grippe. He was suffering from something that neither Dr. Johnny's pink pills, nor his white ones nor the big black ones could alleviate. He was in love, genuinely, utterly, hopelessly in love.

CHAPTER XIX

THE URCHIN BEGINS TO BLOOM

THE first result of young love was a sudden aversion to the well-known but freckled features of Skippy Bedelle. The examination in the looking-gla.s.s had left him in a condition of abject despair. Only a man, full-fledged and resplendent, could hope to hold the affections of the dazzling Mimi Lafontaine, and what a tousled, scrubby little urchin he was! That night he spent one dollar and twenty cents, out of a slender reserve, for toilette accessories, and began the long fight for a part in the middle of his reckless, foaming hair.

The next day marked a milestone in the sentimental progression of Mr.

John C. Bedelle. For the first time in his life, his astonished eyes encountered a little blue envelope inscribed to his name in a large, dashing, unmistakably feminine hand. Neither mother nor sister, aunt or cousin had ever addressed that letter. He picked it up and then set it down with a sudden swimming feeling. It was postmarked "Farmington."

"My Lord, if it should be from her," he said.

There was, of course, one sure way to solve the difficulty, but Skippy was too overcome by his emotion to imagine it. Instead, he sat down and contemplated it with a mystical veneration.

"It can't be. No, no, it can't be from Mimi! Good Lord, no. A girl doesn't write to a man first," he said, shaking his head. "It's from Sis. It's a joke, and she's got some one else to address it. That's it."

He opened the letter, which read as follows:

DEAR JACK,

I'm writing you for Clara, who is, as you know, a dreadfully lazy person. School is over and I shall bring Clara back to Trenton with me day after to-morrow. Are you so bored with my dreadful s.e.x or have you made a little exception? Any way, this is to warn you that you may have to be my cavalier once more if we decide to go again to Princeton.

Faithfully yours, MIMI.

I saw Cora Lantier in New York. She is going up to the Williams Commencement with a _very dear_ friend. Don't tell this to Mr. Sidell.

There are, of course, three ways of contemplating a letter written by a young lady, according to whether the recipient be a friend, is in love, or being in love, loves without hope. Skippy used all three methods.

That night he placed four pairs of trousers to press under his mattress, discarded the d.i.c.ky (a labor saving device formed by the junction of two cuffs and a collar which snapped into place and fulfilled the requirements of table etiquette), and painted the ends of his fingers with iodine to break himself of the habit of living on his nails.