Moving in a curious, rather jerky manner along the street, now walking swiftly, nervously, now hesitating, even stopping, in some shadowy spot, came a youth of twenty (going on twenty-one). He wore--though all these details were hardly distinguishable even in the patches of light at the street corners, where arc lamps sputtered whitely--neatly pressed white trousers, a 'sack' coat of blue serge, a five-dollar straw hat, silk socks of a pattern and a silken 'four-in-hand' tie. He carried a cane of thin bamboo that he whipped and flicked at the grass and rattled lightly along the occasional picket fence except when he was fussing at the light growth on his upper lip. Under his left arm was a square package that any girl of Sunbury would have recognised instantly, even in the shadows, as a two-pound box of Devoe's chocolates.
If you had chanced to be a resident of Sunbury at this period you would have known that the youth was Henry Calverly, 3rd. Though you might have had no means of knowing that he was about to 'call' on Cicely Hamlin. Or, except perhaps from his somewhat spasmodic locomotion, that he was in a state of considerable nervous excitement.
Not that Henry hadn't called on many girls in his day. He had. But he had called only once before on Cicely (the other time had been that invitation to dinner for which her aunt was really responsible) and had then, in a burning glow of temperament, read her his stories!
How he had read! And read! And read! Until midnight and after. She had been enthusiastic, too.
But he wasn't in a glow now. Certain small incidents had lately brought him to the belief that Cicely Hamlin lacked the pairing-off instinct so common among the young of Sunbury. She had been extra nice to him; true. But the fact stood that she was not 'going with' him. Not in the Sunbury sense of the phrase. A baffling, disturbing aura of impersonally pleasant feeling held him at a distance.
So he was just a young fellow setting forth, with chocolates, to call on a girl. A girl who could be extra nice to you and then go out of her way to maintain pleasant acquaintance with the others, your rivals, your enemies. Almost as if she felt she had been a little too nice and wished to strike a balance; at least he had thought of that. A girl who had been reared strangely in foreign convents; who didn't know _The Spanish Cavalier_ or _Seeing Nellie Home_ or _Solomon Levi_, yet did know, strangely, that the principal theme in Dvorak's extremely new 'New World' symphony was derived from _Swing Low, Sweet Chariot_ (which illuminating fact had stirred Henry to buy, regardless, the complete piano score of that symphony and struggle to pick out the themes on Humphrey's piano at the rooms). A girl who had never seen De Wolf Hopper in _Wang_, or the Bostonians in _Robin Hood_, or Sothem in The Prisoner of Zenda, or Maude Adams or Ethel Barrymore or _anything_. A girl who had none of the direct, free and easy ways of the village young; you couldn't have started a rough-house with her--mussed her hair, or galloped her in the two-step. A girl who wasn't stuck up, or anything like that, who seemed actually shy at times, yet subtly repressed you, made you wish you could talk like the fellow's that had gone to Harvard.