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"the Sunday-night bunch." Jimsy was the Committee on Membership.
"Let's have that Burke boy out to supper Sunday, shan't we?" Honor would say. "He's doing so well on the team."
"No," Jimsy would answer, definitely. "Not at the house, Skipper." Honor accepted his judgments unquestioningly. Some way, with the deep wisdom of boys, he knew, better than she could, that the young Burke person was better on the field than in the drawing-room. There was nothing snobbish in their gatherings; shabby boys came, girls who had made their own little dimity dresses. It was the intangible, inexorable caste of the best boyhood, and Honor knew, comfortably, that her particular King could do no wrong.
The rooting section had a special yell for Jimsy, when he had sped down the field to a touchdown or kicked a difficult goal. It followed the regular High School yell, hair-lifting in its fierceness:
King! King! King! K-I-N-G, King! G-I-N-K, Gink! He's the King Gink! He's the King Gink! He's the King Gink! K-I-N-G, King! KING!
and Honor utterly agreed with them.
CHAPTER III
The house across the street from the Carmody place was suddenly sold. People were curious and a little anxious. Every one on that block had been there for a generation or so; there was a sense of permanence about them all--even the Kings.
"Eastern people," said Mrs. Lorimer. "A mother, rather delicate-looking, and one son, eighteen or nineteen I should say. He's frail-looking, too, and he limps a little. I imagine they're very nice. Everything about them"--her magazine reading had taken her quite reasonably to a front window the day the newcomers' furniture was uncrated and carried in--"seems very nice." She hoped, if it developed that they really were desirable that they would be permanent. Los Angeles was coming to have such a floating population....
Honor and Jimsy observed the boy from across the street, a slim, modish person. "Gee," said Jimsy, "it must be fierce to be lame!--to have your body not--not do what you tell it to! I wonder what he does? He can't do anything, can he?" His eyes were deep with honest pity.
"Oh, I suppose he sort of fills in with other things," Honor conceded. "I expect, if people can't do the things that count most, they go in for other things. He seems awfully keen about his two cars."
"They're peaches, both of 'em," said Jimsy without envy.
"And of course he has time to be a wonder at school, if he wants to be."
"Yep. Looks as if he might be a shark at it." He grinned. "Slow on his feet but fast in the head."
"Muzzie's going to call on his mother, and then we'd better ask him to supper, hadn't we? He must be horribly lonesome."
"I'll float over and see him," the last King suggested, "and sort of size him up. Give him the once-over. We don't want to start anything unless he's O. K. Might as well go now, I guess."
"All right. Come in afterward and tell me what you think of him."
He nodded and swung off across the street. It was an hour before he came back, glowing. "Gee, Skipper, I'm strong for that kid! Name's Van Meter, Carter Van Meter. He's got a head on him, that boy! He's been everywhere and seen everything--three times abroad--Canada, Mexico! You ought to hear him talk--not a bit up-stagy, no side at all, but interesting! I asked him for supper, Sunday night. You'll be crazy about him--all the bunch will!" Thus Jimsy King on the day Carter Van Meter limped into his life; thus Jimsy King through the years which followed, worshiping humbly the things he did not have in himself, belittling his own gifts, enlarging his own lacks, glorifying his friend. He had never had a deeply intimate boy friend before; the team was his friend, the squad; Honor had sufficed for a nearer tie. It was to be different, now; a sharing. She was to resent a little in the beginning, before she, too, came under the spell of the boy from the East.
Mrs. Lorimer came smiling back from her call. "Very nice," she told her husband and her daughter, "really charming. And her things are quite wonderful ... rare rugs ... portraits of ancestors. A widow. Here for her health, and the boy's health; he's never been strong. All she has in the world ... wrapped up in him. Very Eastern!"--she laughed at the memory. "She said, 'And from what part of the East do you come, Mrs. Lorimer?' When I said I was born here in Los Angeles she almost gasped, and then she flushed and said, 'Oh, really? Is it possible? But I met some people on shipboard, once--the time before last when I was crossing--who were natives, and they were quite delightful.'"
"The word 'native' intrigues them," said Stephen, drawing off