“And oh, say!” cried the lively Bobby, “we had the greatest joke the other night on Lil Pendleton. You know, she thinks she’s some French scholar—and she does speak high school French pretty glibly——”
“How’s that, young lady?” interposed the girl in brown. “Put away your hammer. Do you dare knock anything taught in Central High?”
“That’s all right, Mother Wit,” drawled Bobby Hargrew. “But any brand of French that one learns out of a book is bound to sound queer in the ears of the Parisian born—believe me! And these Sourat people are the real thing.”
“But what about Lily Pendleton?” demanded one of the two girls who were dressed exactly alike and looked so much alike that one might have been the mirrored reflection of the other.
“Why,” replied Bobby, thus urged by one of the Lockwood twins, “Lil had some of us over to her house the other evening, and she is forever getting new people around her—like her mother, you know. Mrs. Pendleton has the very queerest folk to some of her afternoons-long-haired pianists, and long-haired Anarchists, and once she had a short-haired pugilist—only he was reformed, I believe, and called himself a physical instructor, or a piano-mover, or something——”
“Stop, stop!” cried Jess Morse, making a grab at Bobby. “You’re running on like Tennyson’s brook. You’re a born gossip.”
“You’re another! Don’t you want to hear about these Sourats?”
“I don’t think any of us will hear the end of your story if you don’t stick to the text a little better, Bobby,” remarked a quiet, graceful girl, who stood upright, gazing off over the hillside and wooded valley below, to the misty outlines of the city so far away.
“Then keep ’em still, will you, Nell?” demanded Bobby, of the last speaker. “Listen: The Sourats were invited with the rest of us over to Lily’s, and Lil sang us some songs in American French. Afterward I heard Hester Grimes ask the young man, Andrea Sourat, if the songs did not make him homesick, and with his very politest bow, he said:
“‘No, Mademoiselle! Only seek.’