Chapter IV

Embury was glad to get home again. He thought Millersville a jolly place to live in after Sorgo, Oklahoma, with its constant smell and feel of oil. He enjoyed his old room again and the new car and being with the crowd.

He was not an especially brilliant fellow, nor a rapid thinker, nor much of a reader. He liked a good time, in a quiet way. He wore good clothes and liked to be with others who did. He thought girls were awfully jolly, but hard to get acquainted with. He found the girls in Millersville unusually pleasant. But, of course, that was as it should be; they were home-town girls.

Sophie Redding—she was jolly and cute and had a way of making him feel awfully at home. It was pleasant at the Reddings, sitting out on the big porch and drinking lemonade, with Sophie ready to laugh at his jokes and some of the others of the crowd likely to drop in at any time. Yes, Sophie was a pretty fine girl. His folks liked her, too, always awfully glad when he called on her, kept telling him what a fine girl she was and how much they liked the family. Now, if he showed her a good time all summer and autumn, did all he could for her, maybe Sophie would care for him.

Embury was driving down Hill Street four or five days later when a pretty girl nodded to him, just a formal, pleasant little nod.

Embury couldn’t place her, exactly, but he spoke, of course. He even took his eyes off the road ahead long enough to glance back at her. She was pretty, and he liked little girls who wore plain blue dresses in summer. Some one, probably, he’d met out at the Country Club and didn’t remember. Still, she seemed prettier than most of the girls he had met there. Maybe some one he used to know. He tried to conjure up a childhood acquaintance who might have blossomed into this little blonde girl, but he couldn’t. Anyhow, she was pretty.

Two weeks later, walking up Elm Street after leaving the office—he frequently walked home and always went that way when he did—the same little figure overtook him, passed ahead. His heart palpitated quite pleasantly. But this time the nod was even cooler, more formal. He returned it as cordially as he could. That night there was a dance at the club and Embury watched each new arrival, but there was no pretty little blonde with big eyes and radiant hair. Sophie found him preoccupied and told him so. He tried his best to be more courteous to her. After all, why worry about a strange girl? You couldn’t tell who she might turn out to be.

He saw her again, a week later, when he was driving. Again he received a cool little nod. He’d ask some of the boys about her—she might be good fun—evidently wasn’t one of the crowd. Millersville was a slow place, not much to do, a little affair on the side—by another year he might be married and settled down—might as well have a good time while he could.

He didn’t have to ask any of the boys, for the very next day, on Elm Street, the little figure in blue held out her hand as he overtook her.

“I don’t believe you know me,” she laughed prettily, shyly. “You’ve looked—so amazed, when I’ve spoken. Don’t tell me your years out of town have made you forget old acquaintances altogether. I’m Mamie Carpenter.”

“Why, of course, Miss Carpenter, I’m delighted,” he stammered.

“Oh, I’m so ashamed,” she said, then hurriedly, with embarrassed little pauses between the words: “Here, I’ve stopped you to tell you how—how glad Millersville is to have you back—and—I’m afraid you don’t remember me, after all. I don’t blame you—I was such a little girl when you left—and I’m not—important. But I remember when I went to Grant School, and you were in High, I used to stop every day and watch you practise football. You wore a red sweater, I remember. You—you were one of my youthful heroes, you see.”

He thought, then, that he did remember her, and said so. Little girls change—he knew that. It was pleasant for him to think that, after all these years, she remembered him. He had worn a red sweater—still, wasn’t the school colour red; hadn’t all the other boys worn them, too? Well, anyhow, he had played football. No one else had said anything about those days. How pretty she was—a wonderful complexion! Why, in comparison, it made Sophie’s seem almost pasty. Of course, Sophie was a Redding—that was different—a serious thing, a bully girl, too. Mamie—he liked the name—it was like her, simple, plain, pretty. She might be great fun. To think of her remembering him all these years! What a plain little dress she wore! Poor people, evidently. Oh, well—

Two weeks later, in Elm Street—it was a quiet street, tree-lined—he met Mamie again. She was walking ahead of him, as he turned up from Hill. He caught up with her.

“You live near here?” he asked.

She told him, very seriously, that she lived in Gillen Row and that her parents were awfully poor.

“I—I work, you know—in the Busy Bee, the candy store. It makes things a little easier for mother—and my father. I stopped school before my junior year—to—to help them. Of course I’ve kept up with reading—but—I didn’t mind stopping—my father had an accident and they needed me. It isn’t bad—it’s rather pleasant at the Busy Bee—interesting to watch people.”

“I’m sure you’re the sweetest thing there,” said Embury, and was surprised at his own boldness and a bit ashamed when he saw how Mamie blushed and dropped her eyes. What a dear little thing she was, leaving school to help her folks and not even complaining about it—and not ashamed, either, didn’t try to conceal it. It never occurred to him that he probably would have seen her in the Busy Bee any day and so discovered her position for himself.

“You always walk home in Elm Street?” he asked, to cover her confusion—she was still blushing.

“Yes, it’s so quiet and peaceful, the trees and all.”

“That’s funny. That’s why _I_ go this way, when I don’t take the car to the office.”

“You do?” Mamie showed great surprise. “Isn’t it funny, our tastes in streets?”

Perhaps even more remarkable, if she had mentioned it, would have been the fact that Mamie had never honoured Elm Street with her presence until—investigating by little scurries after leaving the shop in the evening—she had found that Embury usually chose it when walking home.