"What will Tommy Bettersworth say?"
"Why, what has he got to do with it?"
"O-liv-ia! After the way you've encouraged him...."
"You mean because I went to the picnic with him? Well, what can he do about it?" Pauline gave me up with a gesture.
"Tommy is the soul of chivalry," she said, "and anybody can see he is crazy about you, simply crazy." What I really wanted was that she should go on talking about Helmeth Garrett. I wanted ground for putting to her that since all we had been sedulously taught about kissing and all "that sort of thing"—that it was horrid, cheapening, insufferable—had failed to establish itself, had in fact come as a sword, divining mystery, it couldn't be dealt with on the accepted Taylorville basis. I felt the quality of achievement in Helmeth Garrett's right to kiss me, a right which I was sure he lacked only the occasion to establish. But when the occasion came it went all awry.
It was the next Sunday morning, and all down Polk Street the frost-bitten flower borders were a little made up for by the passage between the shoals of maple leaves that lined the walks, of whole flocks of bright winged, new fall hats on their way to church. Mother and Effie were in front and two of my Sunday-school scholars had scurried up like rabbits out of the fallen leafage and tucked themselves on either side of my carefully held skirts. Suddenly there was a rattle of buggy wheels on the winter roughed road; it turned in by Niles's corner and drove directly toward us; the top was down and I made out by the quick pricking of my blood, the Garrett bays and Helmeth with his hat off, his hair tousled, and a bright soft tie swinging free of his vest. You saw heads turning all along the block in discreet censure of his unsabbatical behaviour. He recognized me almost immediately and turned the team with intention to our side of the street. He was going to speak to me ... he was speaking. My mother's back stiffened, she didn't know of course. Forrie wouldn't have had the face to tell her, but how many eyes on us up and down the street did know? A Sunday-school teacher in the midst of her scholars ... and he had kissed me on Thursday!
"Olivia," said my mother, "do you know that young man? Such manners ... Sunday morning, too. Well, I am glad that you had the sense to ignore him;" and I did not know until that moment that I had.
It was because of my habit of living inwardly, I suppose, that it never occurred to me that the incident could have any other bearing on our relations than the secret one of confirming me in my impression of our intimacy being on a superior, excluding footing. He had come, as I was perfectly aware, to renew it at the point of breaking off, and this security quite blinded me to the effect my cold reception might have upon him. That he would fail to understand how I was hemmed and pinned in by Taylorville, hadn't occurred to me, not even when he passed us again on the way home from church, driving recklessly. His hat was on this time, determinedly to one side, and he was smoking, smoking a cigar. I thought at first he had not seen me, but he turned suddenly when he was quite past and swept me a flourish with it held between two fingers of the hand that touched his hat.
At that time in Taylorville no really nice young man smoked, at least not when he would get found out. This offensiveness in the face of the returning church-goers was too flagrant to admit even the appearance of noticing it, but that it would be noticed, taken stock of in the general summing up of our relation, I was sickeningly aware.
Tommy Bettersworth put one version of it for me comfortingly when he came in the evening to take me to church.