Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/240

 cordially polite, Billy's little high-school kid sister turned blue, admiring eyes on her big brother's friend, who was presented as a most prodigious athlete. After supper, at Billy's suggestion they walked over to the hotel, two remodeled farm-houses with shingled sides joined by mission-furnitured piazzas. Billy introduced him to the "finest little girl ever" and Neale was only half-surprised (knowing Billy fairly well) to find she wasn't the same as the "finest little girl" of the winter before. But that was nothing to Neale; there were plenty of other girls, all delighted to buzz around him, to have him dance or play ping-pong, to make fudge, or walk in the moonlight. Some were pretty and some were not, some were bright and some just boisterous. And it was all the same toO Neale. The Horatian pose was a great success. He was delighted with himself.

At the end of a week he prepared to leave. But Billy couldn't see it that way. It was true that Polly was going to have a couple of girl friends at the house next week, and would want Neale's room, but then they'd want Bill's room too. If Billy was to be exiled to a tent, why couldn't Crit keep him company? They'd move the tent up into the Glen, and really camp out, cook their own grub and everything. Crit had said he wanted to camp out! Why not? After all there wasn't any real reason, why he should go …! Next week there was the coaching parade, and all sorts of fun, decorating the hotel three-seater, with ferns and daisies. Then there was a boating excursion to Long Pond where Sarah Davis fell overboard and Neale pulled her out.

Then there was a fateful straw-ride in the August full moon, very near to Neale's nineteenth birthday, and there he met Miss Austin, a new arrival at the hotel. She was almost as tall as Neale, which was very tall indeed for a girl, and she looked to Neale as though she might have stepped right out of a Gibson illustration. This utterly superlative impression of beauty and good form was not lessened even in broad daylight the next morning, when he saw her again on the tennis-court, where she said good-morning with a special look for him in her very fine gray eyes. She did not play tennis, she sat on a