"Oh, I know! I know now why you carry home twice as many books as you used to since he got charge of the library."
"I'm reading the Lady of the Lake and you know it. That's why I stopped in to-night."
"I know why you're always writing compositions since you have him in
English. Lilly's stuck on Lindsley."
Tears were rare with Lilly, but a tremor waved her voice.
"I think you're horrid, Flora Kemble. Anyway, he's more worth while being stuck on than Eugene Bankhead. He's just—just middle-class. His future is to work in Slocum-Hines's hardware store, like his father."
"Well, that's more of a man's job than sitting around in a schoolroom doing lady's work. Papa says Eugene's father is a five-thousand-a-year man. Eugene has all the spending money he wants and they have a conservatory in their house."
"Well, I'd rather be Lindsley than Eugene; besides, he's a kid hardly out of short trousers."
"Silly, you don't think it's Eugene I'm stuck on, do you? His brother Vincent is a big man down at Slocum-Hines's, too, and a catch. I'm going to meet him some day. Lindsley! Ugh! I like a little sponduliks thrown in with a fellow. Lindsley's elbows shine."
For the most part the Board of Education drew upon the offspring of its own system for teaching talent, occasionally letting in an artery of new blood. Lilly's second year in High School such an infusion took place in the form of one H. Horace Lindsley, the young master of arts, his degree rather heavy upon him, dawning blondly and behind high-power pince-nez upon the English department.
Sweet sixteen capitulated to English literature. The double wave of Mr. Lindsley's hair, the intellectual rush of very long, white teeth to the front, somehow mitigating for the sins of a curriculum that could present Gorboduc, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, to young minds illy furrowed for such seed.