Alice Adams Booth Tarkington (ebook reader txt) 📖

said, wonderingly. “I can’t imagine what he could do with it. I wonder⁠—” She paused. “I wonder if he⁠—”

“If he what?” Adams prompted her irritably.

“If he could have bad⁠—associates.”

“God knows!” said Adams. “I don’t! It just looks to me like he had something in him I don’t understand. You can’t keep your eye on a boy all the time in a city this size, not a boy Walter’s age. You got a girl pretty much in the house, but a boy’ll follow his nature. I don’t know what to do with him!”

Mrs. Adams brightened a little. “He’ll come out all right,” she said. “I’m sure he will. I’m sure he’d never be anything really bad: and he’ll come around all right about the glue-works, too; you’ll see. Of course every young man wants money⁠—it doesn’t prove he’s doing anything wrong just because he asks you for it.”

“No. All it proves to me is that he hasn’t got good sense asking me for three hundred and fifty dollars, when he knows as well as you do the position I’m in! If I wanted to, I couldn’t hardly let him have three hundred and fifty cents, let alone dollars!”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to let me have that much⁠—and maybe a little more,” she ventured, timidly; and she told him of her plans for the morrow. He objected vehemently.

“Oh, but Alice has probably asked him by this time,” Mrs. Adams said. “It really must be done, Virgil: you don’t want him to think she’s ashamed of us, do you?”

“Well, go ahead, but just let me stay away,” he begged. “Of course I expect to undergo a kind of talk with him, when he gets ready to say something to us about Alice, but I do hate to have to sit through a fashionable dinner.”

“Why, it isn’t going to bother you,” she said; “just one young man as a guest.”

“Yes, I know; but you want to have all this fancy cookin’; and I see well enough you’re going to get that old dress suit out of the cedar chest in the attic, and try to make me put it on me.”

“I do think you better, Virgil.”

“I hope the moths have got in it,” he said. “Last time I wore it was to the banquet, and it was pretty old then. Of course I didn’t mind wearing it to the banquet so much, because that was what you might call quite an occasion.” He spoke with some reminiscent complacency; “the banquet,” an affair now five years past, having provided the one time in his life when he had been so distinguished among his fellow-citizens as to receive an invitation to be present, with some seven hundred others, at the annual eating and speechmaking of the city’s Chamber of Commerce. “Anyhow, as you say, I think it would look foolish of me to wear a dress suit for just one young man,” he went on protesting, feebly. “What’s the use of all so much howdy-do, anyway? You don’t expect him to believe we put on all that style every night, do you? Is that what you’re after?”

“Well, we want him to think we live nicely,” she admitted.

“So that’s it!” he said, querulously. “You want him to think that’s our regular gait, do you? Well, he’ll know better about me, no matter how you fix me up, because he saw me in my regular suit the evening she introduced me to him, and he could tell anyway I’m not one of these moving-picture sporting-men that’s always got a dress suit on. Besides, you and Alice certainly have some idea he’ll come again, haven’t you? If they get things settled between ’em he’ll be around the house and to meals most any time, won’t he? You don’t hardly expect to put on style all the time, I guess. Well, he’ll see then that this kind of thing was all show-off, and bluff, won’t he? What about it?”

“Oh, well, by that time⁠—” She left the sentence unfinished, as if absently. “You could let us have a little money for tomorrow, couldn’t you, honey?”

“Oh, I reckon, I reckon,” he mumbled. “A girl like Alice is some comfort: she don’t come around acting as if she’d commit suicide if she didn’t get three hundred and fifty dollars in the next five minutes. I expect I can spare five or six dollars for your show-off if I got to.”

However, she finally obtained fifteen before his bedtime; and the next morning “went to market” after breakfast, leaving Alice to make the beds. Walter had not yet come downstairs. “You had better call him,” Mrs. Adams said, as she departed with a big basket on her arm. “I expect he’s pretty sleepy; he was out so late last night I didn’t hear him come in, though I kept awake till after midnight, listening for him. Tell him he’ll be late to work if he doesn’t hurry; and see that he drinks his coffee, even if he hasn’t time for anything else. And when Malena comes, get her started in the kitchen: show her where everything is.” She waved her hand, as she set out for a corner where the cars stopped. “Everything’ll be lovely. Don’t forget about Walter.”

Nevertheless, Alice forgot about Walter for a few minutes. She closed the door, went into the living-room absently, and stared vaguely at one of the old brown-plush rocking-chairs there. Upon her forehead were the little shadows of an apprehensive reverie, and her thoughts overlapped one another in a fretful jumble. “What will he think? These old chairs⁠—they’re hideous. I’ll scrub those soot-streaks on the columns: it won’t do any good, though. That long crack in the column⁠—nothing can help it. What will he think of papa? I hope mama won’t talk too much. When he thinks of Mildred’s house, or of Henrietta’s, or any of ’em, beside this⁠—She said she’d buy plenty of roses; that ought to help some. Nothing could be done about these horrible chairs: can’t take ’em