“Remember her, George?” came his father’s voice like a shot out of a clear sky.
“Who?” asked George, instantly on his guard.
“The girl that came in just now.”
“I didn’t notice. Who was she?”
“Helen Adams.”
“Never should have recognized her.” This was the truth. He had recognized only loveliness, not the maiden name of it.
“Last time you saw her she was a long-legged, saucer-faced youngster, wearing her hair plaited and tied with a blue ribbon, I reckon.”
“That’s the way I remember little Helen,” George admitted, grinning.
“Two years make a lot of difference in a girl of that age. Pretty, ain’t she?”
The young man did not answer. He was suddenly and unaccountably annoyed. When your whole mind is concentrated on a girl, she becomes your religion and you do not care to enter into a doctrinal discussion of this religion with another man, not even your old, gray-haired father, because she has become the sacred silence of your own soul, no matter what or who she was yesterday, nor even if you never had so much as a twinge of soul until this moment. You practically invent your soul then and there out of the joy and daylight of your youth, because it is the only place suitable for such a creature to occupy. Let Moses and the prophets stand aside! This is your pagan period of vestal virgins; not that you know it, but it is.