“Oh, gosh, no, I ain’t smart enough for her, Elmer. She ought to marry a fella with a lot of book-learning like you, and that dresses swell, so she can be in society and everything.”
“But I guess you liked her pretty well yourself, eh? You ought to! Sweetest girl in the whole world. You kind of liked her?”
“Yuh, I guess I did. I—— Oh, well, rats, I ain’t good enough for her, God bless her!”
Elmer spoke of Floyd as a future cousin and professed his fondness for him, his admiration of the young man’s qualities and remarkable singing. (Floyd Naylor sang about as Floyd Naylor would have sung.) Elmer spoke of him as a future cousin, and wanted to see a deal of him.
He praised Lulu and Floyd to each other, and left them together as often as he could contrive, slipping back to watch them through the window. But to his indignation they merely sat and talked.
Then he had a week in Schoenheim, the whole week before Easter. The Baptists of Schoenheim, with their abhorrence of popery, did not make much of Easter as Easter; they called it “The Festival of Christ’s Resurrection,” but they did like daily meetings during what the heretical world knew as Holy Week. Elmer stayed with the Bainses and labored mightily both against sin and against getting married. Indeed he was so stirred and so eloquent that he led two sixteen-year-old girls out of their sins, and converted the neighborhood object-lesson, a patriarch who drank hard cider and had not been converted for two years.
Elmer knew by now that though Floyd Naylor was not exactly a virgin, his achievements and his resolution were considerably less than his desires, and he set to work to improve that resolution. He took Floyd off to the pasture and, after benignly admitting that perhaps a preacher oughtn’t to talk of such things, he narrated his amorous conquests till Floyd’s eyes were hungrily bulging. Then, with giggling apologies, Elmer showed his collection of what he called Art Photographs.
Floyd almost ate them. Elmer lent them to him. That was on a Thursday.
At the same time Elmer deprived Lulu all week of the caresses which she craved, till she was desperate.
On Friday Elmer held morning meeting instead of evening meeting, and arranged that Lulu and Floyd and he should have picnic supper in the sycamore grove near the Bains house. He suggested it in a jocund idyllic way, and Lulu brightened. On their way to the grove with their baskets she sighed to him, as they walked behind Floyd, “Oh, why have you been so cold to me? Have I offended you again, dear?”