"Oh, are they! I'm afraid you haven't had much experience with boys! Most of them are disgusting young savages. Really, Susan! Their hands and feet are too big for them, and their voices don't fit. They're always breaking things—irreplaceable things for choice, and raising the devil of a row. Take my word for it, dear, please. I'm an ex-boy myself; I know all about 'em! They were never created for civilized human companionship. Why, I'd rather give you a young grizzly bear and be done with it, than present you with the common-or-garden brother! But if you'd like a nice quiet little sister some day, maybe——"
"I wouldn't," said Susan.
She was silent again for several moments, pondering. I observed her furtively. Nothing was more distant from my desire than any addition, of any age, male or female, to my present family. Heaven, in its great and unwonted kindness, had sent me Susan; she was—to my thinking—perfect; and she was enough. Whether in art or in life I am no lover of an avoidable anticlimax. But Susan's secret purposes were not mine.
"Ambo," she resumed, "I guess if you'd ever lived in Birch Street you'd feel differently about boys."
"I'm sure you'd feel differently about Jimmy."
"Jimmy?"
"Jimmy Kane, Ambo—my Jimmy. Haven't I ever told you about him?"
Guilefully, persuasively, she edged her chair nearer to mine.
It was then that I first learned of Jimmy's battle for Susan, of the bloody but righteous downfall of Giuseppe Gonfarone, and of many another incident long treasured in the junior annals of Birch Street. Thus, little by little, though the night deepened about us, my eyes were unsealed. What a small world I had always lived in! For how long had it seemed to me that romance was—approximately—dead! My fingers tightened on Susan's, while the much-interrogated stars hung above us in their mysterious orbits and—— But no, that is the pathetic fallacy. Stars—are they not matter, merely? They could not smile.