ot
endure it. She drew her fur coat over the suit and hastily fastened the
buttons, while the boys snickered.

II

No group angered her quite so much as these staring young roues.

She had tried to convince herself that the village, with its fresh air,
its lakes for fishing and swimming, was healthier than the artificial
city. But she was sickened by glimpses of the gang of boys from fourteen
to twenty who loafed before Dyer's Drug Store, smoking cigarettes,
displaying "fancy" shoes and purple ties and coats of diamond-shaped
buttons, whistling the Hoochi-Koochi and catcalling, "Oh, you baby-doll"
at every passing girl.

She saw them playing pool in the stinking room behind Del Snafflin's
barber shop, and shaking dice in "The Smoke House," and gathered in
a snickering knot to listen to the "juicy stories" of Bert Tybee, the
bartender of the Minniemashie House. She heard them smacking moist lips
over every love-scene at the Rosebud Movie Palace. At the counter of the
Greek Confectionery Parlor, while they ate dreadful messes of decayed
bananas, acid cherries, whipped cream, and gelatinous ice-cream, they
screamed to one another, "Hey, lemme 'lone," "Quit dog-gone you, looka
what you went and done, you almost spilled my glass swater," "Like hell
I did," "Hey, gol darn your hide, don't you go sticking your coffin
nail in my i-scream," "Oh you Batty, how juh like dancing with Tillie
McGuire, last night? Some squeezing, heh, kid?"

By diligent consultation of American fiction she discovered that this
was the only virile and amusing manner in which boys could function;
that boys who were not compounded of the gutter and the mining-camp
were mollycoddles and unhappy. She had taken this for granted. She had
studied the boys pityingly, but impersonally. It had not occurred to her
that they might touch her.

Now she was aware that they knew all about her; that they were waiting
for some affectation over which they could guffaw. No schoolgirl passed
their observation-posts more flushingly than did Mrs. Dr. Kennicott. In
shame she knew that they glanced appraisingly at her snowy overshoes,
speculating about her legs. Theirs were not young eyes--there was no
youth in all the town, she agonized. They were born old, grim and old
and spying and censorious.

She cried again that their youth was senile and cruel on the day when
she overheard Cy Bogart and Earl Haydock.

Cyrus N. Bogart, son of the righteous widow who live