His sister made him useful at once, in pouring the tea.
“He’s used to it, and does it better than any girl,” she explained, and I discovered in her an almost feverish eagerness to keep him and make things agreeable for him. He had not just come from Cambridge, it appeared, although he evaded, for some time, his sister’s questions concerning his whereabouts for the day, finally revealing that he had been spending the afternoon with some college chums.
His sister started slightly at this admission, and I saw the sugar-tongs shake in her firm, shapely fingers.
“Oh, you haven’t been to one of those dreadful races again, Ned?” she asked, reproachfully. And I thought that the family revelations were not going to be all on our side.
“I do like to see a fine horse,” said the young man, as if in extenuation. “And I suppose when God made them he intended them to use their speed, didn’t he?” he added, with a little uneasy laugh.
“I’m sure he didn’t intend them to be raced! It’s wicked, besides being coarse and horrid!” his sister returned, with vehemence. “And I would rather be poor, ten times poorer than we were, than that you should come to such things as that!” Her cheeks blazed and there were tears in her eyes, and my heart was so full of sympathy that I could almost have told him, then and there, for a warning, the dreadful things that had happened to our Dave.
“Ten times as poor, Peggy? that would be pretty stiff,” he said, meditatively. “Then I should never have gone to college at all, for there was a race-course pretty near us up there at the country college. But it wasn’t there, it was in Kentucky, where we were brought up, that I learned to love horses.
“However, I haven’t been betting, and you needn’t worry. I’ve always known that it was a sneaking thing to get your gain out of another fellow’s loss. Even up there in the country, where there was such a fuss made, it was the horses that I cared for—not the money.
“I saw about the queerest figure to-day that I ever saw at a race. It was a country old maid. I’m sure she was an old maid—of forty odd, with skimpy black ringlets and clothes that might have come out of the ark. And she was asking every one to point out the different horses to her. She begged me to tell her which was Alf Reeder’s racer. She said she was so ashamed of herself that it seemed as if she should sink right through the ground, but she did want to know which was Alf Reeder’s racer.
“But she seemed to forget all about the horses, after a while, and went to preaching on the evils of horse-racing. I wish you could have heard her preach! Her homely, rough-featured face was all alight. When she got thoroughly under way you wouldn’t have believed that she was the same person.