“You’re from Little Richmond, aren’t you?” he said.
“Yes,” said Laura James, “do you know any one from there?”
“Yes,” said he,
“I know John Bynum and a boy named Ficklen.
They’re from Little Richmond, aren’t they?”
“Oh, Dave Ficklen!
Do you know him?
Yes.
They both go to Pulpit Hill.
Do you go there?”
“Yes,” he said, “that’s where I knew them.”
“Do you know the two Barlow boys? They’re Sigma Nus,” said Laura James.
He had seen them.
They were great swells, football men.
“Yes, I know them,” he said,
“Roy Barlow and Jack Barlow.”
“Do you know ‘Snooks’ Warren?
He’s a Kappa Sig.”
“Yes.
They call them Keg Squeezers,” said Eugene.
“What fraternity are you?” said Laura James.
“I’m not any,” he said painfully.
“I was just a Freshman this year.”
“Some of the best friends I have never joined fraternities,” said Laura James.
They met more and more frequently, without arrangement, until by silent consent they met every night upon the porch.
Sometimes they walked along the cool dark streets.
Sometimes he squired her clumsily through the town, to the movies, and later, with the uneasy pugnacity of youth, past the loafing cluster at Wood’s.
Often he took her to Woodson Street, where Helen secured for him the cool privacy of the veranda.
She was very fond of Laura James.
“She’s a nice girl.
A lovely girl.
I like her.
She’s not going to take any beauty prizes, is she?”
She laughed with a trace of good-natured ridicule.
He was displeased.
“She looks all right,” he said.
“She’s not as ugly as you make out.”
But she WAS ugly — with a clean lovely ugliness.
Her face was freckled lightly, over her nose and mouth: her features were eager, unconscious, turned upward in irregular pertness.
But she was exquisitely made and exquisitely kept: she had the firm young line of Spring, budding, slender, virginal.
She was like something swift, with wings, which hovers in a wood — among the feathery trees suspected, but uncaught, unseen.
He tried to live before her in armor.
He showed off before her.
Perhaps, he thought, if he were splendid enough, she would not see the ugly disorder and meanness of the world he dwelt in.
Across the street, on the wide lawn of the Brunswick — the big brick gabled house that Eliza once had coveted — Mr. Pratt, who crawled in that mean world in which only a boarding-house husband can exist, was watering wide green spaces of lawn with a hose.
The flashing water motes gleamed in the red glare of sunset.
The red light fell across the shaven pinched face. It glittered on the buckles of his arm-bands.
Across the walk, on the other lobe of grass, several men and women were playing croquet.
There was laughter on the vine-hid porch.
Next door, at the Belton, the boarders were assembled on the long porch in bright hashhouse chatter.