Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/27

 as Nanteuil might have appealed to her creator. "This strange talk, I suppose, is just Younger Generation."

"I rather fancy so," said Mr. Pearn.

"What does one do with it?"

"One humors it. At least I do—if I do anything. But when it comes to that, Sophie dear, you yourself look almost Younger Generation!"

Sophie smiled wanly. "Oh those little almosts that life is so desperately full of! . . . Can anybody tell me the time? I stopped in a moment to see Cousin Betty and, so to speak, Cousin Judy, but I suspect I've been due home for at least half an hour."

Grover glanced at his watch. Sophie, he was thinking, could appreciate the fat, somnolent Judy. Rhoda's dogs were the kind that went bounding over landscapes and upset lamps when they came in for tea. "It's almost," he said with reluctant honesty, "a quite unkind little almost, half-past six. But not quite—really."

For the first time Sophie's lips parted in a smile that transfigured her peaked and puckered face into something beautiful,—not almost, but really quite. And a few moments later she was gone.

Grover had chambers on the first floor of a dormitory well outside the gates and well beyond his means. For the red walls and the scratched furniture he was indebted to a former occupant; his own con-