Page:Mosquitos (Faulkner).pdf/156

 feet. Jenny wiggled her free toes with pleasure. Presently she said:

“You're mad, ain’t you?” No reply. “You’ve got a good figure, too,” Jenny offered, conciliatory. “I think you’ve got a right sweet little shape.”

But the other refused to be cajoled. Jenny sighed again ineffably, her milk-and-honey breath. She said: “Your brother’s a college boy, ain’t he? I know some college boys. Tulane. I think college boys are cute. They don’t dress as well as Pete sloppy.” She mused for a time. “I wore a frat pin once, for a couple of days. I guess your brother belongs to it, don’t he?”

“Gus? Belong to one of these jerkwater clubs? I guess not. He’s a Yale man—he will be next month, that is. I’m going with him. They don’t take every Tom, Dick and Harry that shows up in up there. You have to wait until sophomore year. But Gus is going to work for a senior society, anyhow. He don’t think much of fraternities. Gee, you’d sure give him a laugh if he could hear you.”

“Well, I didn’t know. It seems to me one thing you join is about like another. What’s he going to get by joining the one he’s going to join?”

“You don’t get anything, stupid. You just join it.”

Jenny pondered this a while. “And you have to work to join it?”

“Three years. And only a few make it, then.”

“And if you do make it, you don’t get anything except a little button or something? Good Lord Say, you know what I’m going to tell him to-morrow? I’m going to tell him he better hold up the sheet: he’s—he’s— What’s the rest of it?”

“Oh, shut up and get over on your side,” the niece said