"Oh no, I'm not married," he laughed. "Gee! Sam would think that is funny. Me married!"
"Then you have had a—a love-affair with some girl, and—"
"Wrong again!" he laughed, deep in the throat of his ebullient joy. "I've just been a sort of stay-at-home, pretty busy, you know. I've had my hands full of night work, figuring, writing, and planning, and through the day I've been hard at it, as a general thing. No, I'm just, I reckon, not a natural ladies' man." How could he explain to her what he had never understood or even tried to fathom, the reason why he was different from other young men of his age whose manner of life he had only superficially observed?
Tilly seemed still unconvinced. "That girl was Sally Teasdale," she went on. "She was here yesterday. You may remember her—the tall, dark-haired girl that sang in the choir that day and turned my music for me once. She is going to have a party at her house down the road Wednesday night. She is—is dead set on having you there. She says all the girls want to get acquainted with you, and she—she wanted me to—to take you to it."
"To take me to it?" he repeated, hardly understanding what was really meant, for how could a young lady be asking him to a party at her house when no home of that sort had ever been open to him? How could that be true, and that another girl of Tilly's social rank should really be inviting him to escort her?
"I see, you don't want to go," Tilly said, with a touch of mild resentment. "Well, that is for you to decide, and I would not have asked you but there was no way out of it. Even mother advised me to mention it."
Never had his confusion been greater. "Why, I want to go!" he blurted out. "I don't see how you could doubt it. And you say that you will let me go along with you?"
"Yes, but it was Sally's idea; not mine," Tilly urged. "Don't think I go about inviting boys to take me places. You see, you are stopping at our house, and that is why Sally mentioned it to me, but the fact that you pay us board doesn't give me the right to pull you into things you don't care for. You must be your own judge. No doubt you are frightfully tired at night, and if you have writing and figuring to do after work hours, why, it would be wrong of you to bother with a crowd of silly country girls that you never saw before."
"Me tired? Oh no! Leave that out of the question," he warmly thrust in. "I've set up with the boys when they were sick all night long, and worked the next day without feeling it. What ails you? Why don't you think I'd like to go with you? Well, I would— I do want to go."
"Well then, we'll go," Tilly said. "I know you will like the girls—Sally, especially, for she is crazy, simply crazy about you. Huh! and you don't know it? Why, she goes to town nearly every day just to pass the new court-house. Shucks! she knows every layer of brick that goes in it, and every man by name that works under you."