"Oh, I just said that because Eleanor was down on her, and that made me mad. I couldn't go and see her, if I was dying to--'cause I don't know where she lives--unless it was that house she was going into? Do you know, Maurice?"
"Great Scott! How should I know where she lives?"
But it was many days before Maurice's alarm quieted down sufficiently to let him drift back into the furtive security of knowing that neither Edith nor Eleanor could, by any possibility, get on Lily's track. "And, besides, Lily's too good a sport to give anything away. Pretty neat in her to 'forget' that coat! But she ought to be careful not to forget her husband's name!--it seems to be Henry, now."
A moody Maurice, who puzzled her, and a faultfinding Eleanor, whom she was too generous to understand, drove the sixteen-year-old Edith into a real appreciation of Johnny Bennett. With him, she was still in the stage of unsentimental frankness that pierced ruthlessly to what she conceived to be the realities; and because she was as unselfconscious as a tree, she was entirely indifferent to the fact that Johnny was a boy and she was a girl, Johnny, however, nearsighted and in enormous shell-rimmed spectacles, and still inarticulate, was quite aware of it; more definitely so every week,--for he saw her on Saturdays and Sundays. "And it's the greatest possible relief to talk to you!" Edith told him.
Johnny accepted the tribute as his due. They had been coasting, and now, on the hilltop, were sitting on their sleds, resting. "Gosh! it's hot!" Johnny said: he had taken off his red sweater and tied its sleeves around his neck; "zero? You try pulling both those sleds up here, and you'll think it's the Fourth of July," Johnny said, adjusting his spectacles with a mittened hand. He frequently reverted to the grumpy stage--yet now, looking at Edith, grumpiness vanished. She was breathless from the long climb, and her white teeth showed between her parted, panting lips: her cheeks were burning with frosty pink. Johnny looked, and looked away, and sighed.
"Johnny," Edith said, "why do you suppose Eleanor gives me so many call-downs? 'Course I hate music; and once I said she was always pounding on the piano--and she didn't seem to like it!" Edith was genuinely puzzled. "I can't understand Eleanor," she said; "she makes me tired."