Rather surprised, Elsie complied willingly, and they had no sooner turned than he began.
"It's something I've done," he blurted out. "I feel sort of—like thirty cents, you know. I should sort of like to know—what you think of it."
"Whatever it is, I don't believe you need to feel that way about it, Dick," she said gently.
"I do, just the same, though I'm not sure I should have before I knew you, Miss Moss, you're so awfully sort of square, you see," he owned. "I'm glad anyhow it ain't so bad but what I can tell you. This is what it is: one of the other fellows that's about my height and build wanted to go to the motor-show in Boston last week and his dad wouldn't let him. He's simply wild over aeroplanes, and there was a model there, and when the last night came, he got me to help him out. He pretended to go to bed about a quarter of nine. Instead, he sneaked me up the back-stairs and left me in his room, and he caught the nine o'clock for Boston. I went to bed and put out the light. After a while his mother put her head in the door and asked if I was asleep, and then came in and kissed me. About two o'clock he came back, climbed in the window, and I vamoosed. It seemed all right, and I couldn't have refused him, and yet I felt queer."
"I should think you were innocent enough. It seems to me the other boy had all the responsibility of it," Elsie observed.
"That's just what I thought. And I'm dead sure it would only have seemed fun last winter. And I'd have to do it again if he asked me. But—you know that little Howe kid that's trying to stretch himself out to get big enough to be a boy scout?"
"Yes, indeed, Charles Augustus Howe."
"Well, he's always asking me things, and taking my answers so solemnly, and yesterday he wanted to know if I thought it was wrong to tell a lie to yourself in the dark. I tried to reason out the thing with him and—great snakes, but it made me feel queer all over! Talking to that kid about truth and honor and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, I sort of hypnotized myself; but afterward it made me feel cheap. And—and there you are!"
"But you didn't get anything out of it for yourself, Dick," said Elsie.
"Nothing but feeling cheap before that kid."