“Sure, Bobbie, and you’ll forget that I wouldn’t let you kiss me, won’t you?” he answered as he drew back from the table and lit a cigarette after passing me the case. “Everybody calls me Buzz the Bumble Bee because of a historic encounter of mine with a whole nest of bumblebees right out here in the General’s garden. It is a title of heroism and I’d like to have you use it as if we’d been kids together as we were slated to have been. Gee, I bet you could have beat the bees down some. You looked all soft to me when I first saw you but you are so quick and lithe and springy that you must be some steel. What do you weigh out, stripped?”
“Er—er, about one-thirty,” I answered, and I made a resolve not to blush or show anything of embarrassment, no matter what was to be said to me in my estate of a young gentleman.
And I make this note to myself that it is a great pleasure and interest to sit beside a nice young man with a cigarette in his mouth and one in my hand as if for smoking, which I do not like to do from its bitterness, and converse with him about matters of good sense without having in any way to use that coquetry which breaks into small sections the usual conversation between a man and a woman of enthusiastic youngness.
“I tip at one fifty-two, but I’m an inch and a half taller. Do you run? You’re good and deep chested,” he further inquired and it was with difficulty that I again controlled the blush.
“I fence and I’m large of lung,” I answered quickly.
“Ride?”
“Anything ever foaled,” I answered in words I had heard my father use about my horsemanship.
“Don’t smoke?”
“Don’t like it.”
“Golf?”