It was said to an aged woman:
— Were you not once a young girl? And she answered:
— I was a young girl, and I have forgotten....
Among the problems of the age is one that is nearly the same in every home: the day the children's wings harden and they surge forward to fly as they wish and as they please, the fathers and mothers take alarm and refuse to let their children leave the cages and fly with the winds...
It is hoped that fathers and mothers will find in the following tale some remedy for what ails them.
Do you remember??
Do you remember, my darling, the secondary school where we studied in the year 1911? Do you remember the laboratory where we were forever performing chemistry experiments that always failed, and where we went deep in coming to know one another?
Your family had come to live in our town — Oakwood — only a short time before, and your father was a businessman... As for my father, he had died, and I lived with my mother in Hancock Alley, in a house divided into two flats. We occupied one and rented out the other for thirty dollars a month. My mother sewed gowns for the wealthy ladies of the town and walked among people with her head held high, proud of her work... But you knew nothing of this; all you knew was that I was the son of a "dressmaker." Still, people admitted me into your
circle of friends because I was "Jimmy" — Jimmy, captain of the football team and leader of the senior class.
When I told my mother that you had chosen me to escort you to the school dance, I saw her eyes cloud over for a moment; she knew that I thought of nothing but you, and she knew at the same time what an abyss separated "Franklin" Street from Hancock Alley. Yet she said nothing to me except that she was sorry I had no navy-blue suit to wear to the party. But I reassured her that there was no harm in my wearing my new gray suit.
When I went to escort you to the dance you were wearing a new blue dress, and on your shoulders something like a mist of sheer tulle, and in your hair threads of gold, so that your face showed through it all like a dark-hued rose. You stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked at me without noticing my poor suit... And you must have seen in my eyes that look which a man keeps for the most sacred hours of his life.
At that moment your mother arrived. I did not sense "disapproval" in her glance; rather I felt that she was looking at me with sympathy and pity. There was a scarcely visible difference between her manner with me and her manner with the rest of your friends.
And we went on foot, you and I. I carried your dancing shoes for you in a velvet bag. You remember that automobiles were few in those days, and there were no garages, only stretches of green growth in front of the houses with their wide verandas.
We were still in the era of the little notebooks in which the girls set down the names of the dances, and opposite them the names of their partners; so I kept for myself eight of the twelve dances. When I handed the notebook back to you, you threw me a glance that nearly stopped the beating of my heart.
At the end of the last dance I saw gilded motes in your eyes, and it seemed to me that we were listening to music coming down from the stars.
Do you remember that dance hall? Admission for each evening was 25 cents, and the tram fare five cents. People walked in the moonlight along the pavement, and the daughters of the wealthy families among your friends knew that dance hall only by name — until that evening in June when the youth of "Franklin" Street condescended and came to make merry with the children of the common people.
It had been settled that you would travel the next day to spend the summer on an island your people owned in the province of "Maine," and that you would enter the university in the fall, and that I would be deprived of seeing you except on short holidays.
We left the dance hall and walked to the end of the pavement. We had only a few minutes to spend alone, for we had to return to town on the half-past-nine train; we had no more than a quarter of an hour as "provisions" for the whole summer!!
And this conversation passed between us:
— Tomorrow at this very hour you will be traveling on the train.
— I would rather stay here with you.
— I begin my work next week. The beginning will be nothing to speak of, but there are possibilities for the future. I have