“Hush, dear, and don't ask questions that's enough for grown folks to worry over, let alone a boy like you. Now be good,”—a quality in Mrs. Harkutt's mind synonymous with ceasing from troubling,—“and after supper, while I'm in the parlor with your father and sisters, you kin sit up here by the fire with your book.”
“But,” persisted the boy in a flash of inspiration, “is popper goin' to join in business with those surveyors,—a surveyin'?”
“No, child, what an idea! Run away there,—and mind!—don't bother your father.”
Nevertheless John Milton's inspiration had taken a new and characteristic shape. All this, he reflected, had happened since the surveyors came—since they had weakly displayed such a shameless and unmanly interest in his sisters! It could have but one meaning. He hung around the sitting-room and passages until he eventually encountered Clementina, taller than ever, evidently wearing a guilty satisfaction in her face, engrafted upon that habitual bearing of hers which he had always recognized as belonging to a vague but objectionable race whose members were individually known to him as “a proudy.”
“Which of those two surveyor fellows is it, Clemmy?” he said with an engaging smile, yet halting at a strategic distance.
“Is what?”
“Wot you're goin' to marry.”
“Idiot!”
“That ain't tellin' which,” responded the boy darkly.
Clementina swept by him into the sitting-room, where he heard her declare that “really that boy was getting too low and vulgar for anything.” Yet it struck him, that being pressed for further explanation, she did NOT specify why. This was “girls' meanness!”