Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/79

 "Everything but St. Vitus dance, to hear Dopey tell it. He says she's a complete zero. Just out of the cradle, and no stuff at all. He's running around telling everybody how she's the little girl who lives next door and his family roped him into asking her down, so nobody'll make a mistake and take her for his sweetie or anything. He'll have a fine weekend," Bones predicted as an afterthought.

"Seems to me the girl will have a worse one," answered Jock.

Five minutes of three.

The railroad station houses a gathering strictly stag. The platform groans with the tramp and stamp of young masculine impatience, and is animate with trouser-legs as wide as bolster-cases. Hundreds of boys are there, collegians, recognizable anywhere by their clothes, and the tilt of their hats, and their justtubbed look, and their air of insouciance and irresponsibility and "what-the-hell-do-we-care-now." One senses light hearts and heavy hip pockets. They stand in groups, talking, or sit on baggage-trucks and swing their red-shod feet, or lean against posts and stare raptly into space, or rush about with such busy haste that their unbuttoned coats curve out on the air behind them like raccoon wigwams. They laugh, and whistle, and bawl forth jibes and aphorisms. The only thing they do not do is the thing they unanimously want to do—walk out on the tracks and peer for the train. They do not do this because they deem it "kid stuff," the natural trick of a youngster about to be taken on the choo-choo to see Grandma. He who succumbed,