Page:Our Little Girl (1923).pdf/35

 His thin brown hair was matted down restively and he wore the rimless glasses which betokened a presumably memorable occasion.

The dinner started with grape-fruit. Dorothy was not the only one at the table who felt the need of guests derived from other than family sources. If there had been outsiders present Mr. Loamford would have coughed gently, and said, “Don’t think we have grapefruit every night,” snickered, and coughed gently again. He regarded this as a delicately humorous sally. Uncle Elliott, however, needed no alien stimulus.

“Grape-fruit,” he remarked, digging a trench in the hemisphere before him. “We didn’t have anything like this when we graduated from school, eh, Loamford?”

“We weren't like Dorothy,” responded Mr. Loamford with an air of gallantry.

“You did win a medal for penmanship,” demurred his wife.

Mr. Loamford grinned as though pride would be unseemly. “Well, the only medals I won,” boomed Uncle Elliott, “were the hidings I got in the school of hard knocks.”

He hollowed out his grape-fruit solemnly as he thought of his alma mater. Before the advent of publicized guides to gustatory niceties, he would have squeezed the liquid contents of the rind into his spoon.

“You deserve another medal, Loamford,” he continued with a sudden change of mood, “for having such a fine-looking daughter. I guess Miss Blagden’s School is a pretty first-rate one to graduate from, too, isn’t it, Dorothy?”

What could one say in answer to such a question?

“It’s the best in the city,” said Mrs. Loamford, smugly.