Johnny accepted the tribute as his due. They had been coasting, and now, on the hilltop, were sitting on their sleds, resting. "Gosh! it's hot!" Johnny said: he had taken off his red sweater and tied its sleeves around his neck; "zero? You try pulling both those sleds up here, and you'll think it's the Fourth of July," Johnny said, adjusting his spectacles with a mittened hand. He frequently reverted to the grumpy stage—yet now, looking at Edith, grumpiness vanished. She was breathless from the long climb, and her white teeth showed between her parted, panting lips: her cheeks were burning with frosty pink. Johnny looked, and looked away, and sighed.
"Johnny," Edith said, "why do you suppose Eleanor gives me so many call-downs? 'Course I hate music; and once I said she was always pounding on the piano—and she didn't seem to like it!" Edith was genuinely puzzled. "I can't understand Eleanor," she said; "she makes me tired."
"I should think she'd make Maurice tired!" Johnny said, and added: "That's the worst of getting married. I shall never marry."
"When I was a child," Edith said, "I always said that when I grew up I was going to marry Maurice, because he was just like Sir Walter Raleigh. Wasn't that a joke?"
Johnny saw nothing amusing in such foolishness; he said that Maurice was old enough to be her father! As for himself, he felt, he said, that marriage was a mistake. "Women hamper a man dreadfully. Still—I may marry," Johnny conceded; "but it will be somebody very young, so I can train her mind. I want a woman (if I decide to marry) to be just the kind I want. Otherwise, you get hung up with Eleanors."
Edith lifted her chin. "Well, I like that! Why shouldn't she train your mind?"
"Because," Johnny said, firmly, "the man's mind is the stronger."
Edith screamed with laughter, and threw a handful of snow in his neck. "B-r-r-r!" she said; "it's getting cold! I'll knock the spots out of you on belly bumps!" She got on her feet, shook the snow from the edge of her skirt, flung herself face down on her sled, and shot like a blue comet over the icy slope. Johnny sped after her, his big sled taking flying leaps over the kiss-me-quicks. They reached the bottom of the hill almost together, and Johnny, looking at her standing there, breathless and rosy, with shining eyes which were as impersonal as stars, said to himself, with emotion:
"She's got sense—for a girl." His heart was pounding in his broad chest, but he couldn't think of a thing to say. He was still dumb when she said good-by to him at Maurice's door.
"Why don't you come to dinner next Saturday?" she said, carelessly; "Maurice will be away all week on business; but he'll be back Saturday."