"I'm going to pitch for our nine when I go back home. I tell you the fellows don't get on to my curves without some study."
"My boy Lyman's crazy over ball. I can't get a stroke of work out of him. So you play ball, do you?"
"Yes, and football, too," said Gay, carried out of all remembrance of the behavior entailed by skirts and a Gainsborough hat trimmed with daisies. "I generally play half-back," he added.
This was more than the prig could bear in silence. "I have a little girl at home," said he; "she is about your age, but she doesn't kick football, nor play ball, nor swing on the horizontal bar."
"Is she sick—or a cripple?" asked Gay, with polite interest.
"She is a lady," the prig answered.
"She must be like our Alice," said Gay, ignoring the prig's sarcasm. "Alice is so quiet and nice that mother often allows her in the drawing-room when there's a tea or anything. Alice is pretty; her hair is long and the color of molasses candy, and Jane braids it for her and ties it with ribbons. And she has little feet, and little, cunning hands, and she wears kid gloves all the time. But my twin sister is the dandy; Alice isn't a patch on her. She'll stand anything without a whimper. Sand! well, I should say so. She'll face the hottest ball without a wink. She's a boss sprinter—you ought to see her take her three hundred yards!—and she never did a mean thing in her life."
The prig was dumb with amazement when Gay finished this remarkable speech; he could only congratulate himself that his little daughter was not there to hear it.
"I wish I might drive," said Gay, with a wistful glance at the reins.