"I was just thinking how nice it would be if I had some white fox furs."

"For heaven's sake!" commented mother. "When you've already got a new set not two months old!"

Missy didn't reply to that; she didn't want to seem unappreciative.

It was true she had a new set, warm and serviceable, but--well, a short-haired, dark-brown collarette hasn't the allure of a fluffy, snow-white boa.

Mother was going on: "That ought to do you two winters at least--if not three."

"I don't know what the present generation is coming to," put in Aunt Nettie with what seemed to Missy entire irrelevance. Aunt Nettie was a spinster, even older than Missy's mother, and her lack of understanding and her tendency to criticize and to laugh was especially dreaded by her niece.

"Nowadays girls still in knee-skirts expect to dress and act like society belles!"

"I wasn't expecting the white fox furs," said Missy defensively. "I was just thinking how nice it would be to have them." She was silent a moment, then added: "I think if I had some white fox furs I'd be the happiest person in the world."

"That doesn't strike me as such a large order for complete happiness,"

observed father, smiling at her.

Missy smiled back at him. In another these words might have savoured of irony, but Missy feared irony from her father less than from any other old person.

Father was a big, silent man but he was always kind and particularly lovable; and he "understood" better than most "old people."

"What is the special merit of these white fox furs?" he went on, and something in the indulgent quality of his tone, something in the expression of his eyes, made hope stir timidly to birth in her bosom and rise to shine from her eyes.

But before she could answer, mother spoke. "I can tell you that. That flighty Hicks girl went by here this afternoon wearing some. That Summers boy who clerks in Pieker's grocery was with her. He once wanted Missy to go walking with him and I had to put my foot down. She doesn't seem to realize she's too young for such things. Her brown furs will do her for this season--and next season too!"

Mother put on a stern, determined kind of look, almost hard. Into the life of every woman who is a mother there comes a time when she learns, suddenly, that her little girl is trying not to be a little girl any longer but to become a woman. It is a hard moment for mothers, and no wonder that they seem unwarrantedly adamantine. Mrs. Merriam instinctively knew that wanting furs and wanting boys spelled the same evil. But Missy, who was fifteen instead of thirty-seven and whose emotions and desires were still as hazy and uncorrelated as they were acute, stared with bewildered hurt at this unjust harshness in her usually kind parent.

Then she turned large, pleading eyes upon her father; he had shown a dawning interest in the subject of white fox furs. But Mr. Merriam, now, seemed to have lost the issue of furs in the newer issue of boys.

"What's this about the Summers boy?" he demanded. "It's the first I've ever heard of this business."

"He only wanted me to go walking, father. All the rest of the girls go walking with boys." "Indeed! Well, you won't. Nor for a good many years!"

Such unexpected shortness and sharpness from father made her feel suddenly wretched; he was even worse than mother.

"Who is he, anyway?" he exploded further.

Missy's lips were twitching inexplicably; she feared to essay speech, but it was mother who answered.

"He's that red-headed boy who clerks in Pieker's grocery."

"Arthur's a nice boy," Missy then attempted courageously. "I don't think he ought to be blamed just because he's poor and--"

Her defence ended ignominiously in a choking sound. She wasn't one who cried easily and this unexpected outburst amazed herself; she could not, to have saved her life, have told why she cried.

Her father reached over and patted her hand.

"I'm not blaming him because he's poor, daughter. It's just that I don't want you to start thinking about the boys for a long while yet. Not about Arthur or any other boy. You're just a little girl."

Missy knew very well that she was not "just a little girl," but she knew, too, that parents nourish many absurd ideas. And though father was now absurd, she couldn't help feeling tender toward him when he called her "daughter" in that gentle tone. So, sighing a secret little sigh, she smiled back at him a misty smile which he took for comprehension and a promise. The subject of white fox furs seemed closed; Missy was reluctant to re-open it because, in some intangible way, it seemed bound up with the rather awkward subject of Arthur.

After supper father conversed with her about a piece she was reading in the Sunday Supplement, and seemed anxious to make her feel happy and contented. So softened was he that, when Tess telephoned and invited Missy to accompany the O'Neill family to the Methodist church that evening, he lent permission to the unusual excursion.

The unusualness of it--the Merriams performed their Sabbath devotions at 11 A.M.--served to give Missy a greater thrill than usually attends going to church. Besides, since the Merriams were Presbyterians, going to the Methodist church held a certain novelty--savouring of entertainment--and diversion from the same old congregation, the same old church choir, and the same old preacher. In literal truth, also, the new Methodist preacher was not old; he was quite young. Missy had already heard reports of him. Some of the Methodist girls declared that though ugly he was perfectly fascinating; and grandpa and grandma Merriam, who were Methodists (as had been her own father before he married mother, a Presbyterian), granted that he was human as well as inspired.

As Missy entered the Methodist church that evening with the O'Neills, it didn't occur to her memory that it was in this very edifice she had once felt the flame divine. It was once when her mother was away visiting and her less rigidly strict grandparents had let her stay up evenings and attend revival meetings with them. But all that had happened long ago--five years ago, when she was a little thing of ten. One forgets much in five years. So she felt no stir of memory and no presentiment of a coincidence to come.

Reverend MacGill, the new minister, at first disappointed her. He was tall and gaunt; and his face was long and gaunt, lighted with deep-set, smouldering, dark eyes and topped with an unruly thatch of dark hair.

Missy thought him terribly ugly until he smiled, and then she wasn't quite so sure. As the sermon went on and his harsh but flexible voice mounted, now and then, to an impa.s.sioned height, she would feel herself mounting with it; then when it fell again to calmness, she would feel herself falling, too. She understood why grandma called him "inspired."

And once when his smile, on one of its sudden flashes from out that dark gauntness of his face, seemed aimed directly at her she felt a quick, responsive, electric thrill. The Methodist girls were right--he was fascinating.

She didn't wait until after the service to express her approbation to Tess--anyway, to a fifteen-year-old surrept.i.tiousness seems to add zest to any communication. She tore a corner from the hymnal fly-leaf and scribbled her verdict while the elder O'Neills and most of the old people were kneeling in prayer. a.s.suring herself that all nearby heads to be dreaded were reverentially bent, she pa.s.sed the missive. As she did so she chanced to glance up toward the minister.

Oh, dear heaven! He was looking straight down at her. He had seen her--the O'Neill pew was only three rows back. It was too awful. What would he think of her? An agony of embarra.s.sment and shame swept over her.

And then--could she believe her eyes?--right in the midst of his prayer, his harshly melodious voice rising and falling with never a break--the Reverend MacGill smiled. Smiled straight at her--there could be no mistake. And a knowing, sympathetic, understanding kind of smile! Yes, he was human.

She liked him better than she had ever thought it possible to like a minister--especially an ugly one, and one whom she'd never "met."

But after service she "met" him at the door, where he was standing to shake hands with the departing worshippers. As Mrs. O'Neill introduced her, rather unhappily, as "one of Tess's little friends," he flashed her another smile which said, quite plainly: "I saw you up to your pranks, young lady!" But it was not until after Dr. and Mrs. O'Neill had pa.s.sed on that he said aloud: "That was all right--all I ask is that you don't look so innocent when your hands are at mischief."

Oh, she adored his smile!

The following Sunday evening she was invited to the O'Neills' for supper, and the Reverend MacGill was invited too. The knowledge of this interesting meeting impending made it possible for her to view Genevieve and Arthur, again out on a Sunday afternoon stroll, with a certain equanimity. Genevieve, though very striking and vivacious in her white fox, was indubitably a frivolous-minded girl; she, Missy, was going to eat supper with the Reverend MacGill. Of course white fox furs were nice, and Arthur's eyelashes curled up in an attractive way, but there are higher, more enn.o.bling things in life.

The Reverend MacGill did not prove disappointing on closer acquaintance.

Grandpa said he knew everything there is to know about the Bible, but the Reverend MacGill did not talk about it. In a way this was a pity, as his talk might have been instructive, but he got Tess and Missy to talking about themselves instead. Not in the way that makes you feel uncomfortable, as many older people do, but just easy, chatty, laughing comradeship. You could talk to him almost as though he were a boy of the "crowd."

It developed that the Reverend MacGill was planning a revival. He said he hoped that Tess and Missy would persuade all their young friends to attend. As Missy agreed to ally herself with his crusade, she felt a sort of lofty zeal glow up in her. It was a pleasantly superior kind of feeling. If one can't be fashionable and frivolous one can still be pious.

In this n.o.ble missionary spirit she managed to be in the kitchen the next time Arthur delivered the groceries from Pieker's. She asked him to attend the opening session of the revival the following Sunday night.

Arthur blushed and stammered a little, so that, since Arthur wasn't given to embarra.s.sment, Missy at once surmised he had a "date." Trying for an impersonal yet urbane and hospitable manner, she added:

"Of course if you have an engagement, we hope you'll feel free to bring any of your friends with you."

"Well," admitted Arthur, "you see the fact is I HAVE got a kind of date.

Of course if I'd KNOWN--"

"Oh, that's all right," she cut in with magnificent ease. "I wasn't asking you to go with me. Reverend MacGill just appointed me on a kind of informal committee, you know--I'm asking Raymond Bonner and all the boys of the crowd."

"You needn't rub it in--I get you. Swell chance of YOU ever wanting to make a date!"

His sulkiness of tone, for some reason, gratified her. Her own became even more gracious as she said again: "We hope you can come. And bring any of your friends you wish."

She was much pleased with this sustained anonymity she had given Genevieve.

When the opening night of the Methodist revival arrived, most of the "crowd" might have been seen grouped together in one of the rearmost pews of the church. Arthur and Genevieve were there, Genevieve in her white fox furs, of course. She was giggling and making eyes as if she were at a party or a movie show instead of in church. Missy--who had had to do a great deal of arguing in order to be present with her, so to speak, guests--preserved a calm, sweet, religious manner; it was far too relentlessly Christian to take note of waywardness. But the way she hung on the words of the minister, joined in song, bowed her head in prayer, should have been rebuke enough to any light conduct. It did seem to impress Arthur; for, looking at her uplifted face and shining eyes, as in her high, sweet treble, she sang, "Throw Out the Life-Line," he lost the point of one of Genevieve's impromptu jokes and failed to laugh in the right place. Genevieve noticed his lapse. She also noticed the reason. She herself was not a whit impressed by Missy's devotions, but she was unduly quiet for several minutes. Then she stealthily tore a bit of leaf from her hymnal--the very page on which she and other frail mortals were adjured to throw out life-lines--and began to fashion it into a paper-wad.