“You aren’t really scared of poor old Elmer?”
“Yes, I am, a tiny bit!”
“But why?”
“Oh, you’re big and strong and dignified, like you were lots older, and you have such a boom-boom voice—my, I love to listen to it, but it scares me—I feel like you’d turn on me and say, ‘You bad little girl,’ and then I’d have to ’fess. My! And then you’re so terribly educated—you know such long words, and you can explain all these things about the Bible that I never can understand. And of course you are a real ordained Baptist clergyman.”
“Um, uh— But does that keep me from being a man, too?”
“Yes, it does! Sort of!”
Then there was no playfulness, but a grim urgency in his voice:
“Then you couldn’t imagine me kissing you? . . . Look at me! . . . Look at me, I tell you! . . . There! . . . No, don’t look away now. Why, you’re blushing! You dear, poor, darling kid! You can imagine me kissing—”
“Well, I oughtn’t to!”
“ ’Shamed?”