Well, let me tell you I--"
"No, mamma, you don't understand. Take that word 'swells,' for instance.
Oh, I know I've used it myself, but all of a sudden, to-day, it--it
sounded so ordinary."
"For a hundred-dollar-a-month school-teacher that your papa has to pay
taxes to support, I'm not afraid of my p's and q's."
"And, mamma," suddenly and acutely sensitive to pleonasm, "you begin
every sentence with 'say' and you say 'certainly' so often."
"If I don't have a talk with your father when he comes home this night!
That's the thanks I get for sitting through a concert with you when I
might have been enjoying myself at my euchre club. Just get those
high-tone notions out of your head. We're simple people, not swells.
You're a changed child these days."
It was true. An ineffable ache, a darting neuralgia of spirit, too
cunning and quick for diagnosis, was shooting through Lilly her last two
years at High School.
That Horace Lindsley, who was hardly to indent her life and whose
interest in the clean-eyed girl was little more than a leaf upon his
consciousness, and whose feet were already feeling the tug of the
quicksands of mediocrity which were to suck him out of her reckoning,
should have been the innocent source of this neurosis, is hardly
remarkable.
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