“And she’ll beat me to it—juggling. Bess, you’ll soon be going by shy of a nod to me yourself. I’m going to work, just plain digging with no frills on it.”
“Billy!”
They were at their destination with no chance for pursuing the subject.
Billy was not usually self-conscious. Before his experience with Erminie he would have entered Mr. Smith’s elegant parlor as easily, would have met the strange girls who were larger and older than May Nell, as unabashed as if he had been reared in luxury. But now he felt out of place. He was beginning to note social differences; to realize that daughters of very rich men are reared to a luxurious scale of life; that they cannot understand poverty, or even simple comfort. He was seeing that no matter how willing they may think themselves to endure poverty with the loved man, they are totally unfit; and their failure is not their blame.
Something of this made him awkward and silent, while the four girls together with Reginald Steele, Redtop, and Sis Jones, chattered and laughed and joked, till Billy began to wish he had not come.
May Nell did not know of the changes coming to him. She attributed his different attitude toward her entirely to the fact that she was too small and young to interest him. But he was her guest, and courtesy as well as pride determined her to compel him to unbend. She left the others, and on a quickly invented pretext drew him to the farther end of the large room.
“Billy, is it true, as Bess says, that you have given up your part in the Fifth Avenue High play?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Billy, why? When you wrote it, too.”
“No, no! Who told you that? Three of us wrote it; that is, we thought out the stuff, and Mr. Streeter helped us put it in shape.”