he's
a very fine scholar--our pastor told me that the doctor reads French
better than _he_ does, and the doctor's told me some things about
modern French authors that I didn't know, and I used to read French
almost as well as English, when I was a girl, my teachers all told
me--and he says that he thinks that Gertrude has a very fine mind, and
he was _so_ glad that she hasn't been taken in by all this wicked,
hysterical way girls have to-day of thinking they know more than their
mothers."

"Yes, she is--Gertie is----I think she's got a very fine mind," Carl
commented.

(From the other end of the room Gertie could be overheard confiding to
the dentist in tones of hushed and delicious adult scandal, "They say
that when she was in St. Paul she----")

"So," Mrs. Cowles serenely sniffed on, while the bridge of Carl's nose
felt broader and broader, stretching wider and wider, as that stuffy
feeling increased and the intensive heat stung his eyelids, "you see
you mustn't think because you'd rather play around with the boys than
study Latin, Carl, that it's the fault of your Latin-teacher." She
nodded at him with a condescending smile that was infinitely
insulting.

He knew it and resented it, but he did not resent it actively, for he
was busy marveling, "How the dickens is it I never heard Doc Doyle was
stuck on Gertie? Everybody thought he was going with Bertha. Dang him,
anyway! The way he snickers, you'd think she was his best girl."

Mrs. Cowles was loftily pursuing her pillared way: "Latin was _known_
to be the best study for developing the mind a long, long time----"
And her clicking crochet-needles impishly echoed, "A long, _long_
time," and the odor of moth-balls got down into Carl's throat, while
in the golden Olympian atmosphere at the other end of the room Gertie
coyly pretended to slap the dentist's hand with a series of tittering
taps. "A long, _long_ time before either you or I were born, Carl, and
we can't very well set ourselves up to be wiser than the wisest men
that ever lived, now _can_ we?" Again the patronizing smile. "That
would scarcely----"

Carl resolved: "This 's got to stop. I got to do something." He felt
her monologue as a blank steel wall which he could not pierce. Aloud:
"Yes, that's so, I guess. Say, that's a fine dress Gertie 's got on
to-night, ain't it.... Say, I been learning to play crokinole at Ben
Rusk's. You got a board, haven't you? Would you like to play? Does the
doctor play