It was different with Billy. A dozen times a day he came into the house and waited around awkwardly, without asking any questions, but the most his mother ever said about the subject that troubled him was that it was “about time to take the tonic,” as though the completeness of her heart’s desire was assured through that proceeding. Billy had never known her to appear so happy and he knew in his heart that while she had opposed so seriously his staying at home, she felt a support in his presence. A strange dread haunted him that the time might come when she would need him still more. His first important step in the farming operations was to provoke his father’s wrath by the extravagance of adding a bathroom to the house. It was a very simple affair, built on a level with the ground floor, with a hand-force pump and cement storage tank, but
it gave a satisfying touch of comfort and refinement.
Early in the New Year Billy received a scribbled note from the District Representative. “Can you help us with our short course? We have about thirty enrolled for the boys’ class, pretty good fellows practically, but most of them, I dare say, could have had all the schooling they ever got crowded into two full years. To make matters worse, we’re putting on a course for the girls—cooking and the like. A girl taking some post-graduate work at the college is coming down. I expect the thing will develop into considerable of a nuisance before we’re done with it, but we’ll have to see it through.”
Billy’s sympathies were aroused. He readjusted his plans so he could get five days a week off, went to call on the Representative and found him troubled.
“You see, it wouldn’t be so bad,” explained that work-driven, detail-harrassed official, “if it were not for this girls’ affair. Even if they’d keep to themselves it wouldn’t matter so much, but I understand there are to be tobogganings and skating-parties and socials—sort of a sleigh-ride-and-taffy-pull phase of the keep-the-young-people-on-the-farm movement, and I expect it will leave them a hundred per cent more of the hoyden, or a hundred per cent more buried in the
Slough of Sentimentality than if they’d never been the object of an uplift.”
“I expect it will be the best thing that ever happened to them,” said Billy. “Were you ever so scared of a girl that when you went to a neighbor’s in the evening you’d go around to the stable first and wait there till some of the boys came out and took you into the house, sort of under cover?”
“No,” came witheringly from his superior.
“And did you ever find yourself left alone with a girl that you’d known or should have known all your life, a really good-sense, clever girl who must have had lots of ideas of her own, but neither of you could advance any conversation at all because you hadn’t the first shade of a common ground or a common interest? There was nothing to do but try to imitate the smart talk of the imported store-clerk, or go, so because you didn’t want to make a complete donkey of yourself you generally went?”
“I should say not.”