“Why, I don’t know. Perhaps. What do you say, mother?”
“Yes, I think she was. She had on her new winter hat, and it was very becoming.”
“What made you ask that question, Mr. Dean?”
“I wondered if it wasn’t the fact. Sometimes I seem to feel people’s looks. Perhaps it’s the happiness in their voices—if it’s greater than usual; perhaps it’s something too subtle to express. I did have the feeling that Katharine was looking her prettiest to-day. You’d call her a pretty girl, wouldn’t you?”
“In some ways; nice-looking; attractive,” qualified the scrupulous David.
“She’s very pretty, she’s lovely,” declared Mrs. Ives, impatient with her son for his reservations. “I don’t know where you’ll see a prettier girl!”
“Well, there’s Ruth Davenport and Marion Bradley,” David suggested. “Katharine may be just as attractive, but I don’t know that you would call her as pretty. By the way, Lester has invited Ruth to come down to the Yale game, and he’s asked me to look after her for him. I thought it might be a good idea, mother, if you invited her to stay here that night and had a little tea for her after the game.”
“Why, of course,” said Mrs. Ives; and Mr. Dean expressed his pleasure.
Ruth wrote that she was “thrilled” to accept the invitation. And on the morning of the game, when David met her at the station, he thought that he had never seen any one so happy. Indeed, for a long time afterwards in musing moments the memory of her as she had appeared that day when he first caught sight of her would arise before him—a slender figure in a black pony coat with a white fur round her neck and a black velvet hat on her head; she waved her white muff at him while a greeting fairly glowed from her pink cheeks and bright eyes and laughing lips.
“Lester was sorry that he couldn’t meet you himself,” David said. “But the morning of the game they have to keep quiet and avoid excitement.”