“Why do you keep hollering, ‘He hasn’t anything to say to you’?” mocked her brother. “Who hasn’t anything to say? Who? Who? Who?”
“Shut up!” said Dorothy, with more sweetness than the words can carry. “You heard. I said, ‘The good American husband has nothing to say to you.’”
“That is rather a defect,” I assented wickedly, “if you’ve got to be alone with him for the rest of your life. Yes, it’s a rather serious defect in a man with whom, forsaking all others, a girl of twenty expects to spend the next fifty years. But Dorothy, if you don’t take a good American husband, what is the alternative?”
“Oh, a boy of your own age, of course,” she answered promptly. “A boy that you like—like in all ways, I mean: like his voice, like his eyes, like the temperature of his hands—not like fins. He talks with you about the things that interest you—they are just the same as the things that interest him; and you like to do things with him; and if there is anything perfectly splendid, you wish he were there; and whenever you see him coming, your heart begins to dance.”
“Well,” I said, “that seems an attractive sketch. Why not choose a boy like that?”
“Because,” she explained, “it seems as if nowadays none of the boys that one really likes is ever going to amount to much. At any rate, you must wait till your doddering old age before you can hope to be married—and what’s the use then? He won’t be interesting to me, and I won’t be nice for him—then. But we’ll just sit around in padded chairs, with ear-trumpets in our ears, and yell, ‘Whadye say?’ at each other; and wish it were bedtime.”
“I don’t quite understand the reason for this postponement.”
“If,” she said, “they are boys of your own age, and enjoy the books and music that you do, and are nice to dance with, why, then they think they are going to be poets or composers, and so they don’t work, and they flunk out of school—and your mother asks you why you persist in playing around with ‘that worthless fellow’—doesn’t she, Oliver?”
“Yep!” said her brother, and grinned.
Dorothy, leaning across my knees, first pinched, then patted him, and said: “Poor old Ollie! He’s nicer than almost any boy I know, and yet Dad says he’s a ‘worthless fellow,’ too.”