Anyone making a call or visit for the first time always arrives too early. So it was with Walter, who reached City Rest before any of the other guests. But the boys received him cordially and presented him to their mother, who said that Walter had a pretty face, if it were only not so pale.
The other playmates came then, and running and throwing began, in the customary boyish style. This was interrupted with waffles and lemonade, which they “must drink quite slowly,” because they were “wet with perspiration.”
When the proud mother of the Hallemans was speaking of berries and the grossly slandered rainwater barrel, she might have mentioned the advantages of the leafy bower, where Betty was now sitting with a gentleman.
“Who is that?” asked Walter of little Emma, who was playing with the boys.
“That? That’s Betty’s sweetheart.”
From that touching story of slender Cecilia we know that Walter already had his first love affair behind him; but still Emma’s statement was to him something new. Up to that time he had thought that a sweetheart was a girl to whom one gives slatepencils and bonbons. But she seemed to be above such things. Walter saw immediately that he had not taken the right course with Cecilia; and all at once a desire came over him to know how a grown man treats a girl who is through school.
“Her sweetheart?”
“Oh yes—engagé!”
That word was too modern for Walter. If the reader is sharp he can calculate in what year that girl married the barber’s apprentice. All that is necessary is to determine when that stupid engagé came into use in this sense in “III. 7, a.”
“What did you say?” asked Walter.