“I say, Miss Vandergrift, that certainly was hard luck, losing the fine old place that your family had supposed was its own for so many generations.” Then the lad added with sincere admiration: “You girls certainly are trumps! I’m mighty glad I met you, and I hope you’ll be glad, too, some day.”
“Why, Mr. Caldwaller-Cory, I’m glad right this very moment,” Roberta assured him in so impersonal a manner that the lad did not feel greatly flattered. Indeed, he was rather pleased that this was so. Being the son of a famous judge, possessed of good looks, charming manners and all the money he wished to spend, Ralph had been greatly sought after by the fond mothers of the girls in his set, if not by the maidens themselves, and it seemed rather an interesting change to meet a girl whose interest in him was not personal.
After a silent moment in which the lad’s entire attention had been centered on extricating his small auto from a crush of trucks, vegetable-laden push-carts and foreign pedestrians, he turned and smiled at his companion. “Let’s turn over to Central Park now,” he suggested. “It’s a little round about, I’ll agree, but it will be pleasanter riding.”
It was decidedly out of their way, but a glance at her wrist watch assured Roberta that Lena May would have returned to be with Gwen by that time, and so she was in no especial hurry.
How beautiful the park seemed after the thronged noisy East Side with its mingled odors from tobacco, fish markets, and general squalor.
“There, now we can talk,” Ralph said as he drove slowly along one of the winding avenues under a canopy formed by wide-spreading trees. “What shall it be about?”
“You,” Roberta replied. “Tell me about yourself.”
“There isn’t much to tell,” the lad began. “My brother Desmond and I grew up in a happy home. During the winter months we attended a boys’ school up the Hudson, and each summer vacation we traveled with our parents. We have been about everywhere, I do believe. Desmond and I were all in all to each other. We were twins. Perhaps that was why we seemed to love each other even more than brothers usually do. I did not feel the need of any other boy companion, and when at last we entered college we were permitted to be roommates. In our Sophomore year, Desmond died, and I didn’t much care what happened after that. It seemed as though I never could room with another chap; but at last the dormitories were so crowded that I had to take a fellow in. That was two years ago, and today Dick De Laney is as close to me as Desmond was, almost, not quite, of course. No one will ever be that. But, I tell you, Miss Vandergrift, Dick is a fine chap, clear through to the core. I’d bank on Dick’s doing the honorable thing, come what might. I’m a year older than he is, and he won’t finish until June, then he’s coming on here to little old New York and spend a month with me. I say, Miss Vandergrift, I’d like to have you meet him.”
Roberta smiled. “I’ve been waiting for you to come to a period that I might tell you that Dick De Laney and I were playmates when we wore pinafores. You see, they were our next-door neighbors.” Bobs said this in so matter-of-fact a tone that Ralph did not think for one moment that this could be the girl his pal had once told him that he loved and hoped to win.
If only Ralph had realized this, much so might have been saved for one of them.