Harvard University -- Fiction; Love stories; Plantations -- Virginia -- Fiction; Youth -- Fiction
When they reached their seats, after a long and tedious climb which
Kingsford declared was harder than ascending the Jungfrau, Muir, who
had walked with Betty from the square, was detailed to the farther
seat. Kingsford sent his mother in next, then Phillip, followed by
Betty, Miss Wayland and himself. It was not until then that Phillip
had a fair look at the young lady who was to talk Emerson and Thoreau
to him. And it was then that he experienced his second surprise. Betty
Kingsford was small, rather slight, with a good deal of very rebellious
hair of a light brown shade which Phillip didn’t remember ever having
seen before, and which was continually being blown across her face
and continually drawn away again. Her eyes were deeply brown. Phillip
discovered this just after Harvard had made her first touchdown, and
the discovery, for some inexplicable reason, came to him as a shock
and seemed for weeks afterward to be the most wonderful and momentous
discovery of recent years. Her cheeks were like――well, to use Phillip’s
own simile, a simile which he honestly believed he had invented, they
were like wild pink roses. When she laughed, which was frequently, she
showed a number of small and very even teeth of marvelous whiteness.
When she smiled, which was pretty much all the time, she caused a
dimple to appear on each cheek. After that day the tune of “Up the
Street” was associated in Phillip’s mind with pink cheeks and dimples,
laughing brown eyes, and wind-loosened tresses. Phillip’s chronology of
the game would, if written, run something like this:
2 P. M. First spoke to Miss Kingsford.
2:15 Discovered that her eyes were dark-brown and that her hair was the
colour of beech leaves in autumn.
2:25 The left-hand dimple is a trifle deeper than the right-hand
dimple.
2:30 She has the nicest, rippling sort of a laugh you ever heard.
2:45 Our hands touched under the rug; I don’t think she knew it.
2:55 She likes Virginia and has been in our part of it.
3:05 She dropped her score-card. It went under the seat and she
accepted mine.
3:15 She is going to make Everett give a tea in his room some
afternoon. I am to be there.
3:30 She leaned across me to talk to her mother and her hair blew
against my face. It smelled awfully sweet, like violets or――or
something.
3:40 We all stood up and shouted and waved our arms. When we sat down
again she let me tuck the rug about her. She laughed.
3:50 I am going to call some afternoon. And I am to go in for dinner
some night; her mother asked me.
3:55 When we got up I found her score-card and she said I might keep
it. I kept it. Harvard won. I don’t know the score.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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