"WE go to Long Shore, but so many middle-class people have begun coming there, mamma thinks of leaving. The middle classes are simply awful, don't you think?"
"What?"
"They're so boorjaw. You speak French, of course?"
"Me?"
"We ran over to Paris last year. It's lovely, don't you think? Don't you LOVE the Rue de la Paix?"
Penrod wandered in a labyrinth. This girl seemed to be talking, but her words were dumfounding, and of course there was no way for him to know that he was really listening to her mother. It was his first meeting with one of those grown-up little girls, wonderful product of the winter apartment and summer hotel; and Fanchon, an only child, was a star of the brand. He began to feel resentful.
"I suppose," she went on, "I'll find everything here fearfully Western. Some nice people called yesterday, though. Do you know the Magsworth Bittses? Auntie says they're charming. Will Roddy be at your party?"
"I guess he will," returned Penrod, finding this intelligible. "The mutt!"
"Really!" Fanchon exclaimed airily. "Aren't you great pals with him?"
"What's `pals'?"
"Good heavens! Don't you know what it means to say you're `great pals' with any one? You ARE an odd child!"
It was too much.
"Oh, Bugs!" said Penrod.
This bit of ruffianism had a curious effect. Fanchon looked upon him with sudden favour.
"I like you, Penrod!" she said, in an odd way, and, whatever else there may have been in her manner, there certainly was no shyness.
"Oh, Bugs!" This repetition may have lacked gallantry, but it was uttered in no very decided tone. Penrod was shaken.
"Yes, I do!" She stepped closer to him, smiling. "Your hair is ever so pretty."
Sailors' parrots swear like mariners, they say; and gay mothers ought to realize that all children are imitative, for, as the precocious Fanchon leaned toward Penrod, the manner in which she looked into his eyes might have made a thoughtful observer wonder where she had learned her pretty ways.
Penrod was even more confused than he had been by her previous mysteries: but his confusion was of a distinctly pleasant and alluring nature: he wanted more of it. Looking intentionally into another person's eyes is an act unknown to childhood; and Penrod's discovery that it could be done was sensational. He had never thought of looking into the eyes of Marjorie Jones.
Despite all anguish, contumely, tar, and Maurice Levy, he still secretly thought of Marjorie, with pathetic constancy, as his "beau"--though that is not how he would have spelled it.
Marjorie was beautiful; her curls were long and the colour of amber; her nose was straight and her freckles were honest; she was much prettier than this accomplished visitor. But beauty is not all.
"I do!" breathed Fanchon, softly.
She seemed to him a fairy creature from some rosier world than this. So humble is the human heart, it glorifies and makes glamorous almost any poor thing that says to it: "I like you!"
Penrod was enslaved. He swallowed, coughed, scratched the back of his neck, and said, disjointedly:
"Well--I don't care if you want to. I just as soon."
"We'll dance together," said Fanchon, "at your party."
"I guess so. I just as soon."
"Don't you want to, Penrod?"
"Well, I'm willing to."
"No. Say you WANT to!"
"Well----"
He used his toe as a gimlet, boring into the ground, his wide open eyes staring with intense vacancy at a button on his sleeve.
His mother appeared upon the porch in departure, calling farewells over her shoulder to Mrs. Gelbraith, who stood in the doorway.
"Say it!" whispered Fanchon.
"Well, I just as SOON."
She seemed satisfied.
