“I should have known better than to dare a girl like you,” Pauline put in.
“It was horrid of me,” Judy admitted, now almost as interested as Irene in the strange young man. Not because he was Judy’s ideal—a man who wouldn’t notice a cat until its tail bumped into him—but because the papers on his lap might be important. And she had disturbed them.
The man, apparently unaware that the accident had been anybody’s fault, continued reading and correcting. Judy watched her cat carefully until the stack of papers was safely inside his portfolio again.
“That’s finished,” he announced as though speaking to himself. He screwed the top on his fountain pen, placed it in his pocket and then turned to the girls. “Nice scenery, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” Judy replied, laughing, “but you didn’t seem to be paying much attention to it.”
“I’ve been over this road a great many times,” he explained, “and one does tire of scenery, like anything else. Passengers in the bus are different.”
“You mean different from scenery?”
“Yes, and from each other. For instance, you with your ridiculous cat and your golden-haired friend who apologized for you and that small, dark girl are three distinct types.”
Judy regarded him curiously. She had never thought of herself or either of the other girls as “types.” Now she tried to analyze his meaning.
Their lives had certainly been different. Judy and Pauline, although of independent natures, had always felt the security of dependence upon their parents while Irene’s crippled father depended solely upon her. This responsibility made her seem older than her years—older and younger, too. She never could acquire Pauline’s poise or Judy’s fearlessness.