“No, sir; but I am to begin it in September when I go over to the high school,” she replied in her prim, demure way.
“Well anyhow, I probably shouldn’t quote correctly from memory. The passage was rather impressively put and was to the effect that, as a boy, Marcus Livius Drusus had no holidays,—that is, he never had a chance to play, to get out with the boys, to have a jolly time. Well, it came to me that this Roman worthy and I were in the same class. Alike, we had been defrauded of a precious, yes, an inalienable right. You know, it’s not only the fun one loses, Miss Betty; it’s the association with one’s kind, one’s peers, the give and take, the rubbing up against the sharp corners of other fellows’ personalities, the gradual learning one’s proper place in the world, the sharpening of wits as well as quickening of understanding sympathy, the glimpses of homely, sturdy, hidden virtues and the reaching out for them unawares.”
Humphrey Meadowcroft paused, and drew his hand across his brow. He had suddenly grown white; lines showed in his forehead that Betty, close observer as experience had made her, hadn’t noticed before. It seemed to the girl that he had actually grown older since she had entered the room. As a matter of fact, the man had never before said so much as this of his thwarted youth to anyone.
He did not feel that he could go further; but he realized that he had no need so to do. For the girl understood. Her eyes were downcast; her face was almost stolidly inexpressive despite the sweetness of her mouth; nevertheless Meadowcroft was aware that she understood with the sympathetic understanding that is theirs who have themselves suffered hurt and pain.
Still, she did not make the desired application. She was only sorry for the boy.
“Well, Miss Betty?” he said after some moments. His smile, infrequent but rarely attractive, banished the lines of care. And now he looked, as usual, younger than his years, which were four times hers.
Her brown eyes, full of wonder, met his brilliant gray eyes.
“I can’t help feeling, somehow, that you are in the same boat with the boy that was I, and so I want to warn you—back to land while there’s yet time,” he observed half lightly. “For in your case I am happy to feel that it isn’t too late. It isn’t nearly too late. But there’s the chance that it may be so before you realize it. This is how the situation looks to me. Because you are, and perhaps always have been, large for your age, you have never gone in for the things other children take up naturally all along the path of the years. You’re grown up now when you ought to be a little girl—a romping little girl!”
She looked at him so understandingly, so ruefully, so deprecatingly, and she was so big, so truly bouncing, that Meadowcroft couldn’t himself help thinking of the baby giant. But his heart went out to her only the more warmly.
“Tell me. How long is it since you have left off playing—running and romping and all that?” he demanded. “How long have you been as grown-up as you are now?”