“They’re so interchangeable,” Ted mummured. “You start out on the profane tack—and lo!—you’re full of nice sentiments, just when you could do without them. And vice versa.”
“ You!” she said. ‘What do you know about it?” Idly, she raked up grass with her fingers and threw it on him. “A girl in my class,” she said, “is leaving school this summer to take a job. I don’t think it’s sensible for a girl to abandon her education—”
“Maybe she’s a moron.”
“She’s merely an orphan,” Nora replied. “I wish school didn’t last all summer, now. I bet I have to go clear through high school, this way. Just because so many schools got wrecked. I wish I could go to Europe on a student tour. Do you think Dad would ever let me?”
“Dad might, in a few more years. But would your fiancé?”
“Scum!” she said. “What’s Queenie doing?”
“I dunno. I haven’t asked him. Every pretty female in the block, doubtless.”
“I mean—over by the Baileys’—by the old summerhouse?”
Ted peered through the hedge and across the sunlit lawns. “Search me!” The cat was staring in the gazebo, through the lattice, standing on his hind legs. “A peeping Tom cat, I guess.”
“What a lowlife,” she murmured fastidiously—and she went away, to see what Queenie was doing. She came back in less than a minute, running. “Ted! Ted! Oh, Mom! Ted, you were right! The Crandons’ angora is having kittens in there! His kittens, Queenie’s, I bet!”