The Cost | Page 4

Dumont, the roughest boy in the school. He was seven years older than
she, but was only in the Fourth Reader--a laggard in his studies because
his mind was incurious about books and the like, was absorbed in
games, in playing soldier and robber, in swimming and sledding, in
orchard-looting and fighting. He was impudent and domineering, a
bully but not a coward, good-natured when deferred to, the feared
leader of a boisterous, imitative clique. Until Pauline came he had
rarely noticed a girl--never except to play her some prank more or less
cruel.
After the adventure of the raft he watched Pauline afar off, revolving
plans for approaching her without impairing his barbaric dignity, for
subduing her without subduing himself to her. But he knew only one
way of making friends, the only kind of friends he had or could
conceive--loyal subjects, ruled through their weaknesses and fears. And
as that way was to give the desired addition to his court a sound
thrashing, he felt it must be modified somewhat to help him in his
present conquest. He tied her hair to the back of her desk; he
snowballed her and his sister Gladys home from school. He raided her
playhouse and broke her dishes and--she giving desperate battle--fled
with only the parents of her doll family. With Gladys shrieking for their
mother, he shook her out of a tree in their yard, and it sprained her
ankle so severely that she had to stay away from school for a month.
The net result of a year's arduous efforts was that she had singled him
out for detestation--this when her conquest of him was complete
because she had never told on him, had never in her worst encounters
with him shown the white feather.
But he had acted more wisely than he knew, for she had at least singled
him out from the crowd of boys. And there was a certain frank
good-nature about him, a fearlessness--and she could not help admiring
his strength and leadership. Presently she discovered his secret--that his
persecutions were not through hatred of her but through anger at her
resistance, anger at his own weakness in being fascinated by her. This

discovery came while she was shut in the house with her sprained ankle.
As she sat at her corner bay-window she saw him hovering in the
neighborhood, now in the alley at the side of the house, now hurrying
past, whistling loudly as if bent upon some gay and remote errand, now
skulking along as if he had stolen something, again seated on the
curbstone at the farthest crossing from which he could see her window
out of the corner of his eye. She understood--and forthwith forgave the
past. She was immensely flattered that this big, audacious creature, so
arrogant with the boys, so contemptuous toward the girls, should be her
captive.
When she was in her first year at the High School and he in his last he
walked home with her every day; and they regarded themselves as
engaged. Her once golden hair had darkened now to a beautiful brown
with red flashing from its waves; and her skin was a clear olive pallid
but healthy. And she had shot up into a tall, slender young woman; her
mother yielded to her pleadings, let her put her hair into a long knot at
the back of her neck and wear skirts ALMOST to the ground.
When he came from Ann Arbor for his first Christmas holidays each
found the other grown into a new person. She thought him a marvel of
wisdom and worldly experience. He thought her a marvel of ideal
womanhood--gay, lively; not a bit "narrow" in judging him, yet narrow
to primness in her ideas of what she herself could do, and withal
charming physically. He would not have cared to explain how he came
by the capacity for such sophisticated judgment of a young woman.
They were to be married as soon as he had his degree; and he was
immediately to be admitted to partnership in his father's woolen
mills--the largest in the state of Indiana.
He had been home three weeks of the long vacation between his
sophomore and junior years. There appeared on the town's big and busy
stream of gossip, stories of his life at Ann Arbor--of drinking and
gambling and wild "tears" in Detroit. And it was noted that the fast
young men of Saint X--so every one called Saint Christopher--were
going a more rapid gait. Those turbulent fretters against the dam of
dullness and stern repression of even normal and harmless gaiety had
long caused scandal. But never before had they been so daring, so
defiant.
One night after leaving Pauline he went to play poker in Charley

Braddock's rooms. Braddock, only