The Essential Booth Tarkington Collection. Booth Tarkington
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really very terrible about her, but that's only because I don't follow that practice the way most of the others do. They don't stop with the worst of the truth they can find: they make UP things--yes, they really do! And, oh, I'd RATHER they didn't make up things about me--to you!"
"What difference would it make if they did?" he inquired, cheerfully. "I'd know they weren't true."
"Even if you did know that, they'd make a difference," she said. "Oh, yes, they would! It's too bad, but we don't like anything quite so well that's had specks on it, even if we've wiped the specks off;--it's just that much spoiled, and some things are all spoiled the instant they're the least bit spoiled. What a man thinks about a girl, for instance. Do you want to have what you think about me spoiled, Mr. Russell?"
"Oh, but that's already far beyond reach," he said, lightly.
"But it can't be!" she protested.
"Why not?"
"Because it never can be. Men don't change their minds about one another often: they make it quite an event when they do, and talk about it as if something important had happened. But a girl only has to go down-town with a shoe-string unfastened, and every man who sees her will change his mind about her. Don't you know that's true?"
"Not of myself, I think."
"There!" she cried. "That's precisely what every man in the world would say!"
"So you wouldn't trust me?"
"Well--I'll be awfully worried if you give 'em a chance to tell you that I'm too lazy to tie my shoe-strings!"
He laughed delightedly. "Is that what they do say?" he asked.
"Just about! Whatever they hope will get results." She shook her head wisely. "Oh, yes; we do that here!"
"But I don't mind loose shoe-strings," he said. "Not if they're yours."
"They'll find out what you do mind."
"But suppose," he said, looking at her whimsically; "suppose I wouldn't mind anything--so long as it's yours?"
She courtesied. "Oh, pretty enough! But a girl who's talked about has a weakness that's often a fatal one."
"What is it?"
"It's this: when she's talked about she isn't THERE. That's how they kill her."
"I'm afraid I don't follow you."
"Don't you see? If Henrietta--or Mildred--or any of 'em--or some of their mothers--oh, we ALL do it! Well, if any of 'em told you I didn't tie my shoe-strings, and if I were there, so that you could see me, you'd know it wasn't true. Even if I were sitting so that you couldn't see my feet, and couldn't tell whether the strings were tied or not just then, still you could look at me, and see that I wasn't the sort of girl to neglect my shoe-strings. But that isn't the way it happens: they'll get at you when I'm nowhere around and can't remind you of the sort of girl I really am."
"But you don't do that," he complained. "You don't remind me you don't even tell me--the sort of girl you really are! I'd like to know."
"Let's be serious then," she said, and looked serious enough herself. "Would you honestly like to know?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, you must be careful."
"'Careful?'" The word amused him.
"I mean careful not to get me mixed up," she said. "Careful not to mix up the girl you might hear somebody talking about with the me I honestly try to make you see. If you do get those two mixed up--well, the whole show'll be spoiled!"
"What makes you think so?"
"Because it's----" She checked herself, having begun to speak too impulsively; and she was disturbed, realizing in what tricky stuff she dealt. What had been on her lips to say was, "Because it's happened before!" She changed to, "Because it's so easy to spoil anything--easiest of all to spoil anything that's pleasant."
"That might depend."
"No; it's so. And if you care at all about--about knowing a girl who'd like someone to know her----"
"Just 'someone?' That's disappointing."
"Well--you," she said.
"Tell me how 'careful' you want me to be, then!"
"Well, don't you think it would be nice if you didn't give anybody the chance to talk about me the way--the way I've just been talking about Henrietta Lamb?"
With that they laughed together, and he said, "You may be cutting me off from a great deal of information, you know."
"Yes," Alice admitted. "Somebody might begin to praise me to you, too; so it's dangerous to ask you to change the subject if I ever happen to be mentioned. But after all----" She paused.
"'After all' isn't the end of a thought, is it?"
"Sometimes it is of a girl's thought; I suppose men are neater about their thoughts, and always finish 'em. It isn't the end of the thought I had then, though."
"What is the end of it?"
She looked at him impulsively. "Oh, it's foolish," she said, and she laughed as laughs one who proposes something probably impossible. "But, WOULDN'T it be pleasant if two people could ever just keep themselves TO themselves, so far as they two were concerned? I mean, if they could just manage to be friends without people talking about it, or talking to THEM about it?"
"I suppose that might be rather difficult," he said, more amused than impressed by her idea.
"I don't know: it might be done," she returned, hopefully. "Especially in a town of this size; it's grown so it's quite a huge place these days. People can keep themselves to themselves in a big place better, you know. For instance, nobody knows that you and I are taking a walk together today."
"How absurd, when here we are on exhibition!"
"No; we aren't."
"We aren't?"
"Not a bit of it!" she laughed. "We were the other day, when you walked home with me, but anybody could tell that had just happened by chance, on account of your overtaking me; people can always see things like that. But we're not on exhibition now. Look where I've led you!"
Amused and a little bewildered, he looked up and down the street, which was one of gaunt-faced apartment-houses, old, sooty, frame boarding-houses, small groceries and drug-stores, laundries and one-room plumbers' shops, with the sign of a clairvoyant here and there.
"You see?" she said. "I've been leading you without your knowing it. Of course that's because you're new to the town, and you give yourself up to the guidance of an old citizen."
"I'm not so sure, Miss Adams. It might mean that I don't care where I follow so long as I follow you."
"Very well," she said. "I'd like you to keep on following me at least long enough for me to show you that there's something nicer ahead of us than this dingy street."
"Is that figurative?" he asked.
"Might be!" she returned, gaily. "There's a pretty little park at the end, but it's very proletarian, and nobody you and I know will be more likely to see us there than on this street."
"What an imagination you have!" he exclaimed. "You turn our proper little walk into a Parisian adventure."
She looked at him in what seemed to be a momentary grave puzzlement. "Perhaps you feel that a Parisian adventure mightn't please your--your relatives?"
"Why, no," he returned. "You seem to think of them oftener than I do."