“Please tell us,” he pleaded.
“If you had a good chance, Al, you’d soon blossom into a boy—quite a decent boy,” remarked Becky, reflectively. “The trouble is, you’ll never get a chance in that stuck-up crowd you train with. Why don’t you run away and be a man?”
“I am scarcely old enough, I fear,” he sighed.
“Then be a bootblack, or a chimney sweep, or a robber, or—or—anything!”
“Oh, Rebecca!” wailed Doris, greatly shocked. “How sadly the lightness of your mind is reflected in your words!”
“By cracky, you’ve got me going,” returned Becky, despondently. “What does it, Doris; religion, or Boston kindergartens?”
“You have not yet told us what ‘chin music’ means,” suggested Allerton, with much interest. “It is a new term to us.”
“It means a confab, that’s all.”
“You must pardon our ignorance,” Doris observed, in her most proper manner. “Our vocabulary, you know, is limited to authorized words; yet with you the English language seems to have been amplified, and the grammatical construction of many sentences altered. Is it an idiom peculiar to this section of the country, or have you authority for the use of such unusual expressions?”
Somehow, Becky felt distinctly abashed. She might laugh at the proper speech of Doris Randolph and regard it in the light of a good joke; but, after all, she experienced a humiliating sense of her own crudeness and lack of refinement whenever the new neighbors engaged her in conversation.