"There might be things to prevent him—health and things."
"Say, I wouldn't worry about my brother and any girl if I were you. He isn't the marrying kind. I heard Sister tell Mother that. Mother was quizzing her, I guess; you know how mothers are about this suitor proposition. Well, Ruth said that John Swift was the one man she knew that was perfectly satisfied to be a friend, and a good friend to a girl, and that he had told her so. She said she had a perfectly tranquil, lovely friendship with him."
"Oh, dear!" Elizabeth thought.
"Buddy has got a very beautiful nature," she said aloud. "I think a girl of his own age would like him very much, and he would make a good friend to her."
"Ruth would make the best little friend in the world. I think friendship is much more beautiful than love. I don't think I should altogether like it, if my sister and your brother were the other kind, and wanted to behave, well, you know—that way. Would you?"
"I don't know," said Elizabeth, faintly.
On the way home she was very silent, while Peggy chattered, but at her own gate she looked at her friend speculatively.
"Do you know, Peggy," she said, "that there are ways in which I feel a whole lot older than you are?"
"Are there?" said Peggy, uncertainly. "Look, Elizabeth, there's the third Negro. I'll bet we'll really get our fate settled before the summer is over."
That afternoon Elizabeth took her knitting—she was making a scarf for Buddy, who had demanded one to bind himself round, soldier fashion, during the period of his anticipated convalescence on Cape Cod—and sat in Grandfather's chair by the living-room window. Her grandmother was darning stockings on the other side of the branching fern. Elizabeth's knitting would have progressed more rapidly if she had not been keeping a sharp eye on the street, in order that no Negroes should escape her.