Archibald squeezed the small hand tightly.
“Miss Pegeen O’Neill, if you should let your feet float up and your head thump down, I should consider you a Young Person unfit to be trusted with a hat trimmed in pink roses.”
She chuckled gaily.
“But think of the chance the new shoes and stockings would have,” she urged. “I guess I can stay down though, if you don’t let go.”
So they went into the shop hand in hand. Salesfolk and customers looked at the pair—and looked again, and smiled—kindly smiles, touched with curiosity. The two were so oddly mated—the tall lean man with his clean-cut, homely, clever face, his air of authority, his loose-hanging, irreproachably-cut, well-worn tweeds, the slim shabby little girl with happiness flooding her eyes, dimpling her cheeks, playing over her lips.
“Ain’t she a good feeler though!” a blonde at the ribbon counter remarked to the girl next to her. “Makes you ache to see anybody as pleased with things as all that.”
“I c’d be sort of pleased with his Nibs myself,” admitted the friend. “Nobody’s pretty boy but kind of mannish and looks as if he had the price, and c’d be parted from it if he felt good and like it. Guess he’s feelin’ like it all right too. Wonder who they are? The kid’s in right. Anybody c’n see that!”
Archibald, still holding Pegeen’s hand, appealed to a stately and suave floorwalker.
“I want to do some shopping for this young lady,” he explained—“a good deal of shopping, and I’m hopelessly incapable. Now you must have some woman about the place who could take us in hand—sort of advisory committee, pilot, first-aid rôle, some one with good sense and good taste. We’re strong on taste ourselves but we’re not so sure of our sense, eh, Peg?”
She beamed up at him and then transferred the beam to the floorwalker who melted into a semblance of human interest and enthusiasm.