The meeting of the two girls was a curious clinched clasp done technically and punctuated by gasps, long, over-emphasized kisses and such half-shrieked protests as: "Oh, you dear brute, you're squeezing the life out of me—You silly old darned duck—Oh, Honey, isn't this great?" Then they fell apart, and with mutual cool glance of appraisement took each other in. As they turned talking and went up the long stairs, Sard's look was laughingly interrogative.
"Minga, you've bobbed your hair."
"Yes, you like it? The Mede and Persian don't! I had an awful row with the Mede, meaning Dad, but he came around, of course."
Sard looked lovingly at the little curly head; she felt of the thick knot at the back of her own young head and felt somehow old; she tossed it like an impatient colt.
"It must feel nice."
"It feels like October wind blowing over the pink heather," Minga laughed; she passed an arm around the older girl. "Let's go up town and get yours done right away. What do you want with hammocks of long hair? Why, if Absalom had only had his hair bobbed, the whole Bible would have been changed."
The voices of the girls had a curious cadence of indolence, also a rising sense of potential shriek, yet they were not raucous.
This was, however, merely cultivation that was unconscious; other girls of their age who copied their ways of wearing their sport-hats and "rolled" stockings had not attained to the cool middle register of these young tones, the pleasantly insistent quality of the aimless dialogue. Yet all their movements, restless and ungainly with curiously athletic emphasis, seemed to correspond to their sentences, over-stressed yet indifferent, while their young eyes, particularly Minga's, under long-lashed, artificially penciled brows, had hardness and clearness under which lay an everlasting watchfulness.
It is with this watchfulness that the youth of to-day betrays itself. Free from restrictions, from cares and responsibilities, it yet has within it the potentialities of these things. It unconsciously needs standards, longs for them and has them not; therefore, it unconsciously is seeking these standards, if only in the wearing of clothes, in the foot work of a tennis match, in new swimming strokes, in the use of new words. Poor little youth of to-day longing for values, saying with its strange wistful little face: "Does she bob her hair?—then, I'll bob my hair. Does she drink?—well then, I'll drink; does she sprawl over and maul her young men friends?—well, then I'll sprawl and maul."—Poor babies, not one of them strong enough to carve a path of his or her own, all led by the nose, trotting around after each other, all with hats, neckties, turned-down stockings, bathing suits, conventional stencils, voices and ignorance exactly alike. Pathetic, wistful, funny, hungry little American youth.
At the head of the stairs stood Miss Bogart. "My dear!" she held out two hands to Minga, who resolutely seized them and with calm effect of masculinity, gripped them until the lady's mouth twitched with pain.