m. "I don't know
what her father does. She's one of the girls in his class at school."

"Well, that's just like a boy; pick out some putty-faced flirt to take
to church!"

"Oh, she's quite pretty--in that way!" said his wife, deprecatingly. "Of
course that's the danger with public schools. It would be pleasanter if
he'd taken a fancy to someone whose family belongs to our own circle."

"'Taken a fancy'!" he echoed, hooting. "Why, he's terrible! He looked
like a red-gilled goldfish that's flopped itself out of the bowl. Why,
he--"

"I _say_ I wish if he felt that he had to take girls anywhere," said
Mrs. Milholland, with the primmest air of speaking to the point--"if
this sort of thing _must_ begin, I wish he might have selected some
nice girl among the daughters of our own friends, like Dora Yocum, for
instance."

Upon the spot she began to undergo the mortification of a mother who has
expected her son, just out of infancy, to look about him with the eye of
a critical matron of forty-five. Moreover, she was indiscreet enough
to express her views to Ramsey, a week later, producing thus a scene of
useless great fury and no little sound.

"I do think it's in _very_ poor taste to see so much of any one girl,
Ramsey," she said, and, not heeding his protest that he only walked home
from school with Milla, "about every other day," and that it didn't seem
any crime to him just to go to church with her a couple o' times, Mrs.
Milholland went on: "But if you think you really _must_ be dangling
around somebody quite this much--though what in the world you find to
_talk_ about with this funny little Milla Rust you poor father says he
really cannot see--and of course it seems very queer to us that you'd
be willing to waste so much time just now when your mind ought to be
entirely on your studies, and especially with such an absurd _looking_
little thing--

"No, you must listen, Ramsey, and let me speak now. What I meant was
that we shouldn't be _quite_ so much distressed by your being seen with
a girl who dressed in better taste and seemed to have some notion of
refinement, though of course it's only natural she _wouldn't_, with a
father who is just a sort of ward politician, I understand, and a mother
we don't know, and of course shouldn't care to. But, oh, Ramsey! if you
_had_ to make yourself so conspicuous why couldn't you be a little _bit_
more fastidious? Your father wouldn't have minded nearly so much if it
had been