“Brewster High. We had a corking team for a bunch of kids. I’ll say that much for it if it did have to count me in as right half.”
“That is where you’ll play on the ’Varsity, isn’t it?”
“Surest thing you know—if Coach Brock doesn’t find a better man.”
If any one had told Larry one short hour earlier that at half-past five that same afternoon he would be talking thus chummily with a girl—any girl, let alone Miss Elizabeth Holcombe—he would have taken a chance and called that person a hopeless pipe-dreamer. More than that, he went on talking with her, and still more, when the time came for the guests to go to the eastbound train to which their private car was to be attached, he made one of a group of Dick’s and MacClay’s intimates who went to the station to see them off.
It was while they were walking together back to the college side of the river over the reconstructed Main Street bridge that Larry said to Dick: “Did you hear what Miss Bess said to me as I was putting her on her car?”
“Asked you to come to see her if you ever came to New York, didn’t she?”
“That was it. I wonder if you could tell me if she really meant it.”
“Meant it? Of course she did. Why shouldn’t she?”
Larry’s answer was no answer at all, but what he said marked a distinct milestone in his changing—and broadening—attitude toward the moneyed minority.
“The Holcombes seem to be just ‘folks’ like the rest of us,” was his summing up of the plunge into the social amenities; and Dick was wise enough to let the remark stand just as it was made.