Barb frowned.
"You wouldn't wear a last year's hat. Why do you use last century methods with women? They hate compliments."
"Do they? I wonder." And his wonder was genuine. He honestly reflected a moment. Sylvia did hate compliments he knew. But then he never offered her any. He never even flirted with Sylvia, though she was about the only pretty girl of his acquaintance of whom as much could be said. He had been perfectly willing to play the game à deux with this demurely charming, pansy-eyed, little suffragist however. But he was evidently not going to be permitted to have his will. Were Barbara Day and Sylvia and the sharp-tongued Suzanne really a new breed of womankind? Were his own sisters and the dozens of other girls of their kind with whom he had played and danced and flirted for the past five or six years really an older type, soon to be as extinct as the Dodo? Only for a moment, however, he wondered. Jack was not much given to serious thinking. He took life and the feminine sex on the whole rather as he found them. He was always genially ready to "play up" to both. He was now. It was rather agreeable he thought to watch Barb's eyes shine and the color surge in her cheeks, so he laid the match to the tow chiefly from an artistic impulse to see the flame.
"Tell me," he urged. "What is this thing you girls are up to? What is it you are going to New York to do?"
Barb shot him a shrewd rather indignant glance. Then she laughed.
"You don't really care, but, just to punish you, I'm going to tell you. You deserve it."
And then she did tell him, a little reservedly at first, but soon losing both her resentment and her shyness she forgot herself entirely and warmed to her loved theme, betraying something of the dream of her Aunt Josephine, of herself, of all women who think and feel and are forever disenchanted with any Pisgah heights they themselves might have the luck to attain, so long as the great weary horde of the "dispossessed" wait without the gates, scarcely even knowing in the apathy of their misery that there is a Promised Land. And her listener did not scoff even to himself at the revelation he was vouchsafed. He had the grace to recognize with suitable humility that he unworthy had been permitted a brief glimpse into a holy of holies. And irreverence was not one of Jack's failings, for all his habitual levity of mood.
In the meanwhile, not far ahead, Roger and Suzanne were quarreling hotly. At least Suzanne was quarreling. Roger never quarreled, which was perhaps one of his most glaring defects in Suzanne's eyes.
"I told you not to come and you came," was the burden of Suzanne's complaint.
"I didn't come to see you. I didn't even know you were in Greendale until Jack told me. And when I knew, how could I resist a chance to see you, especially as it will be months before I can see you again? Be reasonable, Suzanne. Why are you so angry at me for coming?"