Maisie laughed till she cried. "A toothbrush! A toothbrush! For a present that's something new! Gee, how the girls'll laff when I go back to Nashua and tell them that that's what a guy give me in Boston!"
The humiliation of straitened means was the more galling to Tom Whitelaw, first because he was a giver, and then because he knew the value of money. With the value of money his mind was always playing, not from miserly motives, but from those of social economy. Each time he "blew in," as he called it, a dollar on the girl he said to himself: "If I could have invested that dollar, it would have helped to run a factory, and have brought me in six or seven cents a year for all the rest of my life." He made this calculation to mark the wastage he was strewing along his path in the wild pace he was running.
There was something about Maisie which obliged you to play up to her. She was that sort of girl. If you didn't play up, the mere laughter in her eye made you feel your lack of the manly qualities. It was not her scorn she brought into play; it was her sense of fun; but to the boy of sixteen her sense of fun was terrible.
It was terrible, and yet it put him on his guard. He couldn't wholly give in to her. If she could make moves he could make them too, and perhaps as adroitly. Her tantalizing question was ringing in his ears: If he was going to take a shine to any girl—what of it?
"Oh, if I was going to do that," he tossed off, "it would be to you."
"So that you haven't taken a shine to me—yet?"
"It depends on what you mean by a shine."
"What do you mean by it yourself?"
"I never have time to think." This was a happy sentiment, and a safeguard. "It takes all I can do to remember that I've got to go to college."
"Damn college!"