“Why, Mae, what is the matter with you? You seem to doubt every one and everything. You know Norman is truth itself.” “Is he?” asked Mae, indifferently.
“I’ve seen for a long time,” continued Eric, “that you two were not the friends you once were, but I don’t understand this open dislike. Doesn’t it spoil your pleasure? You don’t seem to have the real old-fashioned good times, my little girl,” and Eric pulled his clumsy dear hand through a twist of the brown hair caressingly.
“O, Eric,” cried Mae, “that is like old times again,” and a tear splattered down into the big hand. “What, crying, Mae?” “No, dear—that is, yes. I believe I am a little bit homesick. I wish I could go back behind my teens again. Do you remember the summer that I was twelve—that summer up by the lake? I wish you and I could paddle around in one of the old flat-bottomed tubs once more, don’t you, Eric? We’d go for lilies and fish for minnows—that is, we’d fish for perch and catch the minnows—and talk about when you should go to college and pull in the race, and I should wear a long dress and learn all the college tunes to sing with you and your Yale friends. Do you remember, Eric? And now, O dear me, you lost your race, and I hate my long gowns. O—my—dear—brother—do you like it all as well as you thought you would?”
“Why, Mae, you poor little tot, you’re sentimental—for you. Yes, I like the future as well as I always did. I never gave much for the present, at any rate.”
“But I did, Eric; I always did, till just now, and now I hate it, and I’m afraid of the future, and I’d like to grow backwards, and instead, in a month, I’ll have another birth-day, and go into those dreadful twenties.” Then Mae was quiet a moment. “Eric, I was sentimental,” she said, after a pause. “Really, I do like the future very much. I quite forgot how much for the moment.”
“You’re a strange child, indeed,” replied Eric, the puzzled. “Your words are like lightning. I had just got melted down and ready to reply to your reminiscences by lots of others, and here you are all jolly and matter-of-fact again. I was growing so dreadfully unselfish that I should have insisted on staying home with you this evening to cheer you up a bit.”
“And give up the mocoletti! Why, Eric! I shouldn’t have known how to take such an offer. No, no, trot off and array yourself, and you may come back and say good-bye.”
“I must say good-bye now, dear, for I dine at the Costanzi with the girls and their aunt.”
“Now, just now, Eric?”
“Why yes, Mae. You are getting blue again, aren’t you? Getting ready for Ash Wednesday to-morrow?”