A Young Man's Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

glance and then studied Mariquita critically.
    “Come away from her,” she said, “she’s Indian.”
    Blair, still a tireless onlooker at the Parisiana Sunday serials, misunderstood her. His thoughts immediately took an entirely different trend from the one she had evidently meant to suggest. Instead of social superiority, snobbishness, and color-consciousness: feather headdresses, tomahawks, war dances and wigwams flashed through his mind.
    “No she isn’t,” he said, “I’m with her every day.”
    She was not to be so easily dissuaded from her purpose, however.
    “I want to whisper a secret in your ear,” she said, “come away where she can’t hear us.” And she pulled him by the arm, still young enough to do her own urging instead of making others give the appearance of urging her, as she would in a very few years’ time.
    He never stopped to reason that speaking in their own language was adequate enough safeguard for any secret where the unilingual Mariquita was concerned. He allowed her to lead him away. She had considerable strength of mind for one so young. What she evidently wanted was not so much his own presence as Mariquita’s complete ostracism. He failed to see it.
    When she had led him across the street, to the sunny side where originally he had not wanted to go, she cupped her lips to his ear with both hands and murmured silkily, “Pretend I’m telling you something.” Then followed a series of ear-tickling sibilances meant to imitate whispering, “Sish, wish, wish,” which sent a not-unpleasant shiver traveling down his back. When she had done this she turned and made a deliberately shocking face at Mariquita by stretching her mouth between two fingers and pushing up her nose with a third.
    Mariquita had remained squatting on the ground, watching them with dejected eyes. This last unmerited insult, however, kindled her to reply in kind with an even more barbarous grimace of her own immediate conception, by placing a coiled finger at each temple like a pair of horns, and she ended by spitting venomously on the ground in the direction of her haughty adversary. She then turned to the baby and forced an indulgent interest in it, talking to it, petting it, and adjusting sections of its apparel. She even took up a handful of colored pebbles and tossed them in the air and caught them in her hands for the baby’s amusement and her own. All very heart-rending, had there been anyone there to witness it with the proper amount of detachment.
    Finally, getting no consolation from the baby, she left it for a moment and ran into the house, and when she came out again and was about to rejoin it she called to him offhandedly, as though nothing had happened and as though no disloyalty had ever been shown on his part. “Blerr, the señora asks for you.”
    Blair quitted the side of the new satellite none too reluctantly, and left her standing there unrepentant and unprotected to go indoors in answer to the summons.
    Estelle and the satellite’s mother were sitting having what might otherwise have been termed tea but for the omission of that honorary beverage itself. A siphon of charged water took its place, and a dark green bottle with a collar of red tinfoil wrapped sleekly around its neck. There was also a dish of sugar wafers that had not diminished by one since the friend’s daughter had been permitted to indulge herself, judging by their unbrokenly matched arrangement on the plate.
    “Did you want me?” Blair said, materializing in the doorway. “Mariquita said you wanted me.”
    “Not in the least,” Estelle said, and a gayety which she seemed to share at the moment with her friend welled up in her eyes and turned the corners of her mouth into what might best be described as an inward, contemplative smile. “She’s jollying you. Never let the girls jolly you, Blair. Ask your father about that.”
    “I guess she made it up,” Blair remarked.
    Before he had quite gone again she suddenly