“Only the first time.”
They had reached Keturah Smiley’s house. Mermaid invited little, old Mr. Vanton in. She gave him crullers and coffee, made him acquainted with Miss Smiley, and then said good-bye to him at the gate. It was agreed that they should meet the next afternoon pour parler Français. As the French instructor hurried homeward he lit a cigarette. This was observed by the Messrs. Hand and Lupton, who were considerably dazed.
“And I called him a sissy,” murmured Mr. Hand.
“D’ye know what I think?” exclaimed his side partner. “He’s a foreigner, that’s what he is, a cigarette-smoking foreigner. Mermaid ought not to have anything to do with a fellow like that,” Tommy concluded, virtuously, and with the sense of the protecting male.
VII
Mermaid and Monsieur Guy Vanton made friends with each other quickly, aided, perhaps, by the graces of the French language. At eleven years it is not hard to learn French, especially if your instructor speaks with a pure accent and makes conversation in it the order of the day. Mermaid found that Guy did not go to school because his father didn’t wish him to, for reasons not given. Guy said he didn’t know what was back of his father’s objections, unless it was that he would have to go away from home. “You see, I’ve had the equivalent of high school,” he told Mermaid. “It would have to be college—or maybe a year somewhere to get ready for college. I don’t much care. I read a lot—we’ve heaps of books—and I—I write sometimes,” he confessed, diffidently.
“What do you write?” Mermaid ventured. “Say it in French,” he reminded her and after he had corrected her question so put, he replied in French: “Mostly poetry.”
He got quite red, so that Tommy Lupton, who had been dishonourably spying from behind a shrub in the next yard, was incensed.
“Some day I’m going to knock his block off,” Tommy told himself.
Afterward he accosted Mermaid down the street, greeting her calmly but with a touch of sadness in his tone. She was a nice, if misguided, girl; Tommy didn’t want to hurt her feelings but this business couldn’t be allowed to go on.