Blair nodded again. "Right off."
"Huh!" said David; "your mother won't let you. You are only sixteen.
Don't be an ass."
"I'll be seventeen next May."
"Seventeen! What's seventeen? I'm pretty near eighteen, and I haven't thought of being married;—at least to anybody in particular."
"You couldn't," Blair said coldly; "you haven't got the cash."
David chewed this bitter fact in silence; then he said, "I thought you and Elizabeth were kind of off at dinner. You didn't talk to each other at all. I thought you were both huffy; and instead of that—" David paused.
"That damned dinner!" Blair said, dropping his love-affair for his grievance. Blair's toga virilis, assumed in that hot moment in the hall, was profanity of sorts. "David, I'm going to clear out. I can't stand this sort of thing. I'll go and live at a hotel till I go to college; I'll—"
"Thought you were going to get married?" David interrupted him viciously.
Blair looked at him, and suddenly understood,—David was jealous! "Gorry!" he said blankly. He was honestly dismayed. "Look here," he began, "I didn't know that you—"
"I don't know what you're talking about," David broke in contemptuously; "if you think I care, one way or the other, you're mistaken. It's nothing to me. 'By"; and he turned on his heel.