"I simply couldn't stand it another minute," she said.
As they issued into the moonlight she drew in a full, long breath and asked: "Why should any one want to sit indoors on such a night? It's—it's a crime!"
She was very tiny beside him; he was very awkward beside her. "The long and the short of it," they were called by those who knew them best. She was wont to defend their friendship by saying she detested little men, whilst he complained that great, tall, awkward women he abhorred.
"Well, if you're both satisfied," Nibs, her brother, said one day after half an hour of teasing; "I guess the public ought to be."
Their friendship had grown from the chance meeting on the day of the State Street race when Nibsey defeated Billy Shaw and then was so ignominiously defeated by the lank creature who now was his, as well as his sister's, closest friend and constant companion. That day their eyes had met—Bunny's and the girl's—across a carriage seat. Only for an instant though it was, each remembered the instant; Wilma with a certain indefinite anger, Bunny with a very definite desire that one day he might meet the owner of the eyes.
They did not meet formally until a month after and then it was Nibsey who named them to each other with many flourishes and mock heroics. In a very short time that glance across the carriage seat had developed into a close, fine companionship; a companionship so close indeed that it was deemed sufficient by divers of their friends to warrant whispers that Bunny and Wilma were engaged. For in Ann Arbor He has but to play two games of tennis with Her, and take Her on the river once, to have it become known that They are "engaged"—whatever that sadly misused term may signify to the non-elect.
Perhaps, however, in this case there was some reason for the smiles of patronizing acceptance and whispered suggestions on the part of their friends, of an unestablished but imagined relationship. Bunny never was seen with any other girl and Wilma, being out of college and therefore having a wider acquaintance among undergraduates than if she were a college girl, was only now and again beheld in the company of another man.
One winter they had attended the Choral Union concerts together, had driven together, and in the spring they had walked together, rowed together. It was doubly hard for their friends to believe they were not engaged, for did they not, as well, attend all the lectures on the course of the S. L. A.? Would a girl demean herself so far, suffer torture so exquisite, it was asked, as to attend sad lectures with one certain man if she were not very much in love with him? And if a man were not willing to make sacrifice of his happiness to be beside her would he take her to a lecture on a night in June, or even so much as suggest such a proceeding?