They were passing a church a little distance from their own; here the congregation was just emerging to the open, and among the sedate throng descending the broad stone steps appeared an accompanied Ramsey--and a red, red Ramsey he was when he beheld his father and mother and sister and brother-in-law staring up at him from the pavement below. They were kind enough not to come to an absolute halt, but passed slowly on, so that he was just able to avoid parading up the street in front of them. The expressions of his father, mother, and sister were of a dumfoundedness painful to bear, while such lurking jocosity as that apparent all over his brother-in-law no dignified man should either exhibit or be called upon to ignore.
In hoarse whispers, Mrs. Milholland chided her husband for an exclamation he had uttered. "John! On Sunday! You ought to be ashamed."
"I couldn't help it," he exclaimed. "Who on earth is his clinging vine? Why, she's got ~lavender~ tops on her shoes and--"
"Don't look round!" she warned him sharply. "Don't--"
"Well, what's he doing at a Baptist church? What's he fidgeting at his handkerchief about? Why can't he walk like people? Does he think it's obligatory to walk home from church anchored arm-in-arm like Swedes on a Sunday Out? Who ~is~ this cow-eyed fat girl that's got him, anyhow?"
"Hush! Don't look round again, John."
"Never fear!" said her husband, having disobeyed. "They've turned off; they're crossing over to Bullard Street. Who is it?"
"I think her name's Rust," Mrs. Milholland informed him. "I don't know what her father does. She's one of the girls in his class at school."
"Well, that's just like a boy; pick out some putty-faced flirt to take to church!"
"Oh, she's quite pretty--in that way!" said his wife, deprecatingly.
"Of course that's the danger with public schools. It would be pleasanter if he'd taken a fancy to someone whose family belongs to our own circle."
"'Taken a fancy'!" he echoed, hooting. "Why, he's terrible! He looked like a red-gilled goldfish that's flopped itself out of the bowl. Why, he--""I ~say~ I wish if he felt that he had to take girls anywhere," said Mrs. Milholland, with the primmest air of speaking to the point--"if this sort of thing ~must~ begin, I wish he might have selected some nice girl among the daughters of our own friends, like Dora Yocum, for instance."
Upon the spot she began to undergo the mortification of a mother who has expected her son, just out of infancy, to look about him with the eye of a critical matron of forty-five. Moreover, she was indiscreet enough to express her views to Ramsey, a week later, producing thus a scene of useless great fury and no little sound.
"I do think it's in ~very~ poor tast to see so much of any one girl, Ramsey," she said, and, not heeding his protest that he only walked home from school with Milla, "about every other day," and that it didn't seem any crime to him just to go to church with her a couple o' times, Mrs. Milholland went on: "But if you think you really ~must~ be dangling around somebody quite this much--though what in the world you find to ~talk~ about with this funny little Milla Rust you poor father says he really cannot see--and of course it seems very queer to us that you'd be willing to waste so much time just now when your mind ought to be entirely on your studies, and especially with such an absurd ~looking~ little thing--
"No, you must listen, Ramsey, and let me speak now. What I meant was that we shouldn't be ~quite~ so much distressed by your being seen with a girl who dressed in better taste and seemed to have some notion of refinement, though of course it's only natural she ~wouldn't~, with a father who is just a sort of ward politician, I understand, and a mother we don't know, and of course shouldn't care to. But, oh, Ramsey! if you ~had~ to make yourself so conspicuous why couldn't you be a little ~bit~ more fastidious? Your father wouldn't have minded nearly so much if it had been a self-respecting, intellectual girl. We both say that if you ~must~ be so ridiculous at your age as to persist in seeing more of one girl than another, why, oh why, don't you go and see some really nice girl like Dora Yocum?"
Ramsey was already dangerously distended, as an effect of the earlier part of her discourse, and the word "fastidious" almost exploded him; but upon the climax, "Dora Yocum," he blew up with a shattering report and, leaving fragments of incoherence ricochetting behind him, fled shuddering from the house.
For the rest of the school term he walked home with Milla every afternoon and on sundays appeared to have become a resolute Baptist.
It was supposed (by the interested members of the high-school class) that Ramsey and Milla were "engaged." Ramsey sometimes rather supposed they were himself, and the dim idea gave him a sensation partly pleasant, but mostly apprehensive: he was afraid.
He was afraid that the day was coming when he ought to kiss her.
