"Would you kind of help me keep interested?" said John, looking at his feet. "I haven't done anything that I haven't wanted to, for so long, that I've lost the knack. If you'd help me keep interested,—will you?"
"You bet I will!" answered K. Stuyvesant.
"Thank you," said John quietly. K. Stuyvesant's hand tightened on John's shoulder convulsively. Then he took it away. Cecilia's voice had seemed to say the little "thank you." He was shaken, and vastly relieved when John began to talk of monoplanes. He wondered with dull misery if all his years would be full of this "where is the rest of me?" feel. "Why isn't she here? How can we be apart when I feel like this?"
He looked at John. The monoplane essay had ceased. "How is your sister?" asked K. Stuyvesant gruffly.
"Cecilia," said John, "I wish you'd come in." He was by the door of his bedroom as he spoke. Cecilia answered that she'd be happy to come in, and stepped past him. "I'm going to college," said John dramatically after he'd closed the door. "Stuyvesant wants me to. He thinks he can get me in his Frat. He's going to buy an aeroplane, but he says I can't go up unless you say so. Can I? Are you glad I'm going to college?"
Cecilia was entirely bewildered, but said she was glad he had decided to go to college. She sat in a low chair by a table, and her bewilderment increased when John took several photographs from his bureau and threw them carelessly into the waste basket. Next she saw Fanchette thrown in a table drawer, which was then slammed.
"John dear," said Cecilia, "are you sick?"
"No," answered John, then she saw a twinkle in his eyes, often there in the little boy days. "I'm Irish," he continued, "and I can see a joke, even on myself. I've tried to be very old, Celie."
She put her arms around his neck. He hid his face against her throat, and she felt him shake. The joke was forgotten. "It's so hard," she heard in muffled tones; "I'm ashamed of dad, and then I try to gloss it over, I——"
"If it hadn't been for dad," said Cecilia slowly, "we would have both been getting slabs of peat out of an Irish bog, surely barefooted, probably hungry."