Bevy snapped the screen door shut.
"Je gelehrter, je verkehrter" (The more learned, the more perverse), she declared.
When Bevy had reached the upper hall, Katy rose from her place on the lowest step, and stretched out her arms as though to embrace the garden and Millerstown and the world. Mist was rising from the little stream below the orchard; it veiled the garden in a lovely garment; it seemed to intensify the odor of the honeysuckle and the late roses. Again Katy sank down on the step and hid her face in her arms.
"He kissed me!" said Katy shamelessly.
Now Katy's winter was guarded against unhappiness.
A little later in September David Hartman went to school also, not to the normal school where tuition cost nothing, but to college as befitted the heir of a rich man. His tutor had prepared him thoroughly for his examinations; he had an ample allowance; there was no reason why the gratification of any legitimate desire should be denied him. His mother had spared no pains with his outfit; she had bought and sewed and laundered and packed a wardrobe such as, it is safe to say, no other student in the college possessed. During the long summer she and David had had little to say to each other. David had been constantly busy with his books; he had had little time even to think of his father, whom he so passionately regretted. Death continued to work its not uncommon miracle for John Hartman; it dimmed more and more for his son the character of his later years, and exaggerated greatly the vaguely remembered tendernesses of David's babyhood. John Hartman had to an increasing degree in his death what he had not had in life, the affection and admiration of his boy. How was it possible for him to be anything else but silent with a wife so cold, so immovable, so strange? David was certain that he had solved his father's problem. Sometimes David could not bear to look at his mother.
But now that he was going away, David's eyes were somewhat sharpened. His mother looked thin and bent and tired; she seemed to have grown old while she sewed for him.
"You ought to get you a girl," he said with the colossal stupidity of youth and of the masculine mind.
Mrs. Hartman looked at him, as though she were suddenly startled. He seemed to have grown tall overnight; his new clothes had made a man of him. Then a film covered her eyes, as though she withdrew from the suggestions of lunacy into some inward sanctuary where burned the lamp of wisdom.
"A girl!" cried Cassie, as though the suggestion were monstrous. "To have her spoil my things! A girl!"