We’ll stand right here and point ’em out.
That’s my sister, Gertrude, over there talking to Scott Nicholson.”
Clyde noted that a small, dark girl dressed in pink with a pretty and yet saucy and piquant face, nodded to him.
And beside her a very de rigueur youth of fine physique and pink complexion nodded jerkily. “Howja do.”
And a few feet from them near a deep window stood a tall and yet graceful girl of dark and by no means ravishing features talking to a broad-shouldered and deep-chested youth of less than her height, who were proclaimed to be Arabella Stark and Frank Harriet.
“They’re arguing over a recent Cornell–Syracuse foot-ball game . . .
Burchard Taylor and Miss Phant of Utica,” he went on almost too swiftly for Clyde to assemble any mental notes. “Perley Haynes and Miss Vanda Steele . . . well, I guess that’s all as yet.
Oh, no, here come Grant and Nina Temple.”
Clyde paused and gazed as a tall and somewhat dandified-looking youth, sharp of face and with murky-gray eyes, steered a trim, young, plump girl in fawn gray and with a light chestnut braid of hair laid carefully above her forehead, into the middle of the room.
“Hello, Jill.
Hello, Vanda.
Hello, Wynette.”
In the midst of these greetings on his part, Clyde was presented to these two, neither of whom seemed to pay much attention to him.
“Didn’t think we’d make it,” went on young Cranston speaking to all at once.
“Nina didn’t want to come, but I promised Bertine and Jill or I wouldn’t have, either.
We were up at the Bagleys’.
Guess who’s up there, Scott.
Van Peterson and Rhoda Hull.
They’re just over for the day.”
“You don’t say,” called Scott Nicholson, a determined and self- centered looking individual. Clyde was arrested by the very definite sense of social security and ease that seemed to reside in everybody.
“Why didn’t you bring ’em along? I’d like to see Rhoda again and Van, too.”
“Couldn’t.
They have to go back early, they say.
They may stop in later for a minute.
Gee, isn’t dinner served yet?
I expected to sit right down.”
“These lawyers! Don’t you know they don’t eat often?” commented Frank Harriet, who was a short, but broad-chested and smiling youth, very agreeable, very good-looking and with even, white teeth.
Clyde liked him.
“Well, whether they do or not, we do, or out I go.
Did you hear who is being touted for stroke next year over at Cornell?”
This college chatter relating to Cornell and shared by Harriet, Cranston and others, Clyde could not understand.
He had scarcely heard of the various colleges with which this group was all too familiar.
At the same time he was wise enough to sense the defect and steer clear of any questions or conversations which might relate to them. However, because of this, he at once felt out of it.
These people were better informed than he was — had been to colleges.
Perhaps he had better claim that he had been to some school.
In Kansas City he had heard of the State University of Kansas — not so very far from there.
Also the University of Missouri.
And in Chicago of the University of Chicago.
Could he say that he had been to one of those — that Kansas one, for a little while, anyway?
On the instant he proposed to claim it, if asked, and then look up afterwards what, if anything, he was supposed to know about it — what, for instance, he might have studied.
He had heard of mathematics somewhere.
Why not that?
But these people, as he could see, were too much interested in themselves to pay much attention to him now.
He might be a Griffiths and important to some outside, but here not so much — a matter of course, as it were.
And because Tracy Trumbull for the moment had turned to say something to Wynette Phant, he felt quite alone, beached and helpless and with no one to talk to.
But just then the small, dark girl, Gertrude, came over to him.
“The crowd’s a little late in getting together.
It always is.
If we said eight, they’d come at eight-thirty or nine.
Isn’t that always the way?”