IX
NEXT DOOR
The house next door had been vacant for two months when the New Family moved in. We had looked forward with excitement, not unmodified by unconscious aversion, to the arrival of the New Family.
“Have they any girls?” we had inquired when the To Rent sign had come down.
They had, it appeared, one girl. We saw her, with wavy hair worn “let down” in the morning, though we ourselves wore let-down hair only for occasions, pig-tails denoting mornings. She had on new soles—we saw them showing clean as she was setting her feet daintily; and when we, who were walking the fence between the two houses, crossed glances with her, we all looked instantly away, and though it was with regret that we saw her put into the ’bus next day to go, we afterward learned, to spend the Spring with her grandmother in a dry climate, we still felt a certain satisfaction that our social habits were not to be disquieted.
Nothing at all had been suspected of a New Boy. Into that experience I came without warning.
I was sitting on the flat roof of my play-house in the fence corner, laboriously writing on the weathered boards with a bit of a picket, which, as everybody knows, will make very clear brown letters, when the woodshed door of the house next door opened, and the New Boy came out. He came straight up to the fence and looked up at me, the sun shining in his eyes beneath the rimless plush cap which he was still wearing. He was younger than I, so I was not too afraid of him.
“What you got?” he inquired.
I showed him my writing material.
“I wrote on a window with a diamond ring a’ready,” he submitted.
I had heard of this, but I had never wholly credited it and I said so. Besides, it would wear the ring out and who wanted to wear out a diamond ring to write on a window?