While Caroline Was Growing | Page 9

simply. "She'd ought to have been a boy.
She'd have made a fine one."
The man's face cleared.
"Do--do you want a job?" he said abruptly. "We're short up at my place,
and I wouldn't mind the dog. I remember you, now. You caught a
chicken for me once; my wife gave you a hot supper."
The boy smiled faintly and shook his head. "I remember," he said. "No,
I don't believe I want any job, thank you. I--I'm sort of--I have to keep
along."
"Keep along? Where?"
He waved his hand vaguely.
"Oh, just along," he repeated. "This year, anyhow. Maybe--well,
good-by. Her folks might be gettin' anxious."
He stepped up to the cart and looked once more at the flushed cheeks
and brown hands, then strode off up the road.
The egg-and-chicken man gathered up the reins and the wagon started.
Caroline scowled a little at the motion, but slept on. The boy whistled
to the dog.
"Come on, William Thayer," he said. "I guess it's just you and me
now."

II
A LITTLE VICTORY FOR THE GENERAL

Caroline, Miss Honey, and the General were taking the morning air.
Caroline walked ahead, her chin well up, her nose sniffing pleasurably
the unaccustomed asphalt, the fresh damp of the river and the watered
bridle path. The starched ties at the back of her white pinafore fairly
took the breeze, as she swung along to the thrilling clangor of the
monster hurdy-gurdy. Miss Honey, urban and blasé, balanced herself
with dignity upon her roller-skates and watched with patronizing
interest the mysterious jumping of young persons with whom she was
unacquainted through complicated diagrams chalked on the pavement.
The General sucked a clothespin meditatively: his eyes were fixed on
something beyond his immediate surroundings. Occasionally a
ravishing smile swept up from the dimples at his mouth to the yellow
rings beneath his cap frill; he flapped his hands, emitting soft, vague
sounds. At such times a wake of admiration bubbled behind him. Delia,
who propelled his carriage, which resembled a victoria except for the
rearward position of its motor power, pursed her lips consciously and
affected not to hear the enraptured comments of the women who passed
them.
To the left the trees, set in a smooth green carpet, threw out tiny,
polished, early May leaves; graceful, white-coated children dotted the
long park. Beyond them the broad blue river twinkled in the sun, the
tugs and barges glided down, the yachts strained their white sails
against the purple bluffs of the Palisades. To the right towered the long,
unbroken rows of brick and stone: story on story of shining windows,
draped and muffled in silk and lace; flight after flight of clean granite
steps; polite, impersonal, hostile as the monuments in a graveyard.
Immobile ladies glided by on the great pleasure drive like large tinted
statues; dressed altogether as the colored pictures in fashion books,
holding white curly dogs in their curved arms; the coachmen in front of
them seemed carved in plum-colored broadcloth; only by watching the
groom's eyelids could one ascertain that they were flesh and blood.
Young girls, two, three, and four, cantered by; their linen habits rose
and fell decorously, their hair was smooth. Mounted policemen,
glorious in buttons, breathing out authority, curvetted past, and

everywhere and always the chug-chug-chug of the gleaming,
fierce-eyed motor cars filled one's ears. They darted past, flaming
scarlet, sombre olive and livid white; a crouching, masked figure, intent
at the wheel, veiled, shapeless women behind a whir of dust to show
where they had been a breath before.
And everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, a thin stream of white
and pink and blue, a tumbling river of curls and caps and bare legs,
were the children. A babble of shrill cries, of chattering laughter, of
fretful screams, an undercurrent of remonstrance, of soothing patience,
of angry threatening, marked their slow progress up and down the walk;
in the clear spaces of the little park they trotted freely after hoops and
balls, rolled and ran over the green, and hid, shouting, behind the
bushes. It was a giant nursery, and the mere man who trespassed on its
borders smiled deprecatingly, and steered a careful course among the
parasols and tricycles, stooping now and then to rescue some startled
adventurer, sprawling from the disgusted shock of encounter with this
large and rapidly moving object.
To Caroline, fresh from untrammeled sporting, through neighborly
suburban yards, this disciplined procession, under the escort of Delia
and the General, was fascinating to a degree. Far from resenting the
authority she would have scorned at home, she derived an intense
satisfaction from it, and pranced ostentatiously beside the perambulator,
mimicking Miss Honey's unconscious deference to a higher power in
the matter of suitable crossings and preferred