hoyden,” he observed an unwonted dignity. He overheard a few conversations discussing landscape effects for the spring planting, and the practicability of power systems for the farms and homes of the districts. Instead of discovering his teen-age irresponsibles floundering “in the Sloughs of Sentimentality,” he found a free and easy mixing of a few older people in every entertainment and none of the clandestine pairing off so general in some of their former affairs. He inquired how the parties and sleigh-rides always came to be chaperoned by some women of the neighborhood, and was informed that the girls arranged it. He marvelled that the gatherings always broke up not later than eleven o’clock, and heard from more than one mystified youth that the girls seemed to have some secret understanding; no one knew what had come over them.
On the last day of the course, when Billy returned from taking the boys to see the Aberdeen-Angus herd that had played such an important part in directing his own early interests, he found the Representative unusually worried, and interrupting his enthusiastic report of the day’s proceedings with the irrelevant question:
“Have you seen Miss Macdonald to-day?”
Billy hadn’t seen her.
“Well, she’s got a beast of a cold, and looks like destruction,” the Representative grumbled. “I wish she was out of that hotel. She never
should have been there in the first place. I’ll bet the walls are fairly dripping dampness, and you probably know that when she’s at home she lives in a steam-heated, electric-ventilated palace of a place, with a kind of millionaire uncle.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Queer she should care about knocking around at a job like this.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“What would I be likely to do about it? I suppose what she needs is mustard plasters and ginger-tea. What would you suggest that we do?”