Aunt Caroline preened herself just a little.
“I may be very old-fashioned but this statistic collecting seems very foolish to me. Just a fad. Now when we send out a missionary to a heathen country we don’t ask for statistics. We want to know how many souls he has saved.”
“That might in itself be a modest statistic,” laughed Horatia.
“And,” concluded Aunt Caroline with the air of one who quotes the irrefutable and has a right to quote it, “I’m sure ‘the poor ye have always with you.’”
There was a moment’s silence. Then Maud giggled.
“Let’s stop the deep stuff, for pity’s sake. There he comes, Horatia.”
Harvey could be seen passing the dining-room windows. Maud giggled again and jumped up to look at herself in the mirror of the sideboard. Then she went through the hall to meet her fiancé.
“Horatia’s home,” they could hear her saying, “she’s an awful highbrow. Not much like poor chicken-brained me.” She made her apologies for her lack of mind with enormous pride and Harvey said something in a low voice at which there was another giggle. Horatia felt reluctant to meet him again but she folded her napkin and went out on the porch where the two lovers had settled themselves. Harvey shook hands with her a little awkwardly but not as awkwardly as she had expected. Working in the city had put a keener edge on him. He held his head better and talked better English—not entirely the slangy boy and girl stuff which she had always had from him. On the whole, as she looked him over, Horatia thought her sister was doing rather well. Nothing exceptional in Harvey, of course, but after all he would make a good husband. They talked for a little and Harvey was intelligent on all the subjects which she, a little priggishly, introduced. He was a graduate of her University and full of reminiscence. But for all his pleasant conversation Horatia found herself feeling in the way. Harvey’s arm stealing over the back of Maud’s chair—Maud’s affected, immensely assured little laugh as if she had a world at her feet and need make no effort—it puzzled Horatia. It seemed inconceivable that this well-ordered young man should want her to go so that he could make silly love to a giggling Maud and yet—— She stood up and prepared to go into the house. Neither protested.
From that vacation on, Horatia began to be the “intellectual one” in her circle of friends. At first she resented it, then liked it and grew ultimately into complete indifference to what West Park did or didn’t think. But that was later. At first she found herself set apart and left out of the jokes. Before she went back to the University Maud was “settled,” not in West Park, but in an apartment in the city itself, more accessible for Harvey and better suited to his wife’s budding passion for storming the society of the city. With her going Horatia had dropped out of the circle of friends who used to come to the children’s parties. The girls had married or gone East or to Normal schools. The boys were marrying or flirting with city girls. Yet, though the reality of her relations with the suburb had all changed, faded, she never lost the feeling that she belonged to it and was in a measure bound to go back to it. She knew that her aunt and uncle wanted her to live with them—and that dull as their affection was, they were used to her and wanted her. But stronger than their call was her feeling of West Park’s physical beauty, of the vigor of its cool, brisk winds and of the greatness of the great lakes spread out at the foot of the city and all its suburbs. It was always a relief to come back from the flat little university town.
She had done rather well at the University, though, as she told Maud, she had not “gone in” for the social side of the undergraduate life, the life which was so important to many of the girl students. A great deal of that side of the University bothered her and repelled her. There were girls who seemed to care about nothing except prolonged tumultuous flirtations which included an immense amount of kissing and physical demonstration. Horatia allied herself with the group which considered such things a disgrace to the college. It was a strong group, not too large, and they substituted for the flirtations of the other girls an intense interest in and elaborate discussion of the modern woman and her relations to men. They were constantly exchanging cold-blooded little ideas for perfecting the sex. And underneath their scorn for the hand-holding undoubtedly persisted an interest in the very thing they scorned, judging by the time they put on the subject.