"What do you care?" soothed Pauline, "besides, you have to be teased about somebody, you know, and have somebody to choose you when they play clap in and clap out. You just have to. Look at me." Pauline had been carrying on the discreetest of flirtations with Henry Glave for some months. "Tommy Bettersworth is a nice boy, and besides, dear, we'll have so much more in common."
Pauline was right. Unless you had somebody to be teased about you were really not in things. I was furiously embarrassed by it, but I was resigned. Tommy sent me two notes that winter and a silk handkerchief for Christmas which I pretended was from Pauline. I am not going to be blamed for this. It was at least a month earlier that I had observed Tommy Bettersworth's inability to get away from Nile's corner on his way home from school until I had passed there on mine. It struck me as a very interesting trait of masculine character; I would have liked to talk it over with my mother on the plane of human interest; it seemed possible she might have noted similar eccentricities. I remember I worked around to it Saturday morning when I was helping her to darn the tablecloths. My mother was not unprepared; she did her duty by me as it was conceived in Taylorville, and did it promptly.
"You are too young to be thinking about the boys," she said. "I don't want to hear you talking about such things until the time comes."
This was so much in line with what was expected of parents, that I blinked the obvious retort that the time for talking about such things was when they began to happen, and went on with the tablecloths. But I couldn't tell her about the handkerchief after that. It would have been positively unmaidenly. And after he had sent me a magnificent paper lace valentine, I distinctly encouraged Tommy Bettersworth.
This being the case, I do not know just how it began to be conveyed to me, as in the lengthening evenings of spring, Tommy took to church-going, that his hands were coarse and his ears too prominent, and as I confided solemnly to Pauline, though I had the greatest respect for his character, I simply couldn't bear to have him about. This was the more singular since the church-going was the visible sign of the good influence that, according to the books, I was exercising; and though Tommy was as nearly inarticulate as was natural, I was in no doubt on whose account this new start proceeded. If I had not disliked Tommy very much at this period, why should I have taken to tucking myself between Forester and Effie on the way home, embarrassedly aware of Tommy, whose way did not lie in our direction, scuffling along with the Lawrences on the other side of the street? I seem to remember some rather heroic attempts on Tommy's part to account for his presence there on the ground of wanting to speak privately to Forester, certain shouts and sallies toward which my brother displayed a derisive consciousness of their not being pertinent to the occasion.
I have often wondered how much of these tentative ventures toward an altered relation were observed by our elders; not much, I should think. At any rate no mollifying word drifted down from their heights of experience to our shallows of self-consciousness.
My mother adhered to her notion of my not being at an age for "such things," borne out, I believe, by the consensus of paternal opinion that she might too easily "put notions" in my head; not inquiring what notions might by the natural process of living be already there. Perhaps they were not altogether wrong in this, so delicate is the process of sex development that nature herself obscures the processes. To this day I do not know how much my taking suddenly to going home with Belle Endsleigh by a short cut was embarrassment, and how much a discreet feminine awareness that in my absence Tommy would better manage to make the family take his walking with them as a matter of course, but I remember that I cried when my mother, who did not approve of Belle Endsleigh, scolded me. And then quite suddenly came the click and the loosened tension of the readjustment.
Along about Easter Alfred Allingham told Pauline that Tommy had thrashed Charlie Gower, and though it was supposed to be the strictest secret, it was because Charlie had teased him about me. Pauline was rather scandalized by my insistence that Charlie wouldn't have done it if Tommy hadn't rather conspicuously brought it on himself.
"I call it truly noble of him ... like a knight." Pauline could always throw the glamour of her reading around the immediate circumstance. "At any rate, after this you can't do anything less than treat him politely," she urged.
Whether it would have made any difference in my attitude or not, it did in Tommy's. I saw that when he came out of the church with us next Sunday. There was a certain aggressive maleness in the way he strode beside me, that there was no mistaking. I looked about rather feebly for Belle.