The Younger SetChambers, Robert W. (Robert William)
General
The Younger Set
Chambers, Robert W. (Robert William)
Fiction
Kathleen Lawn, a big, leisurely, blond-skinned girl, who showed her
teeth when she laughed and shook hands like a man, declared him
"adorable" but "unsatisfactory," which started one of the Dresden-china
twins, Dorothy Minster, and she, in turn, ventured the innocent opinion
that Selwyn was misunderstood by most people--an inference that she
herself understood him. And she smiled to herself when she made this
observation, up to her neck in the surf; and Eileen, hearing the remark,
smiled to herself, too. But she felt the slightest bit uncomfortable
when that animated brunette Gladys Orchil, climbing up dripping on to
the anchored float beyond the breakers, frankly confessed that the
tinge of mystery enveloping Selwyn's career made him not only adorable,
but agreeably "unfathomable"; and that she meant to experiment with him
at every opportunity.
Sheila Minster, seated on the raft's edge, swinging her stockinged legs
in the green swells that swept steadily shoreward, modestly admitted
that Selwyn was "sweet," particularly in a canoe on a moonlight
night--in spite of her weighty mother heavily afloat in the vicinity.
"He's nice every minute," she said--"every fibre of him is nice in the
nicest sense. He never talks 'down' at you--like an insufferable
undergraduate; and he is so much of a man--such a real man!--that I like
him," she added naively; "and I'm quite sure he likes me, because he
said so."
"I like him," said Gladys Orchil, "because he has a sense of humour and
stands straight. I like a sense of humour and--good shoulders. He's an
enigma; and I like that, too. . . . I'm going to investigate him every
chance I get."
Dorothy Minster liked him, too: "He's such a regular boy at times," she
explained; "I do love to see him without his hat sauntering along beside
me--and not talking every minute when you don't wish to talk. Friends,"
she added--"true friends are most eloquent in their mutual silence.
Ahem!"
Eileen Erroll, standing near on the pitching raft, listened intently,
but curiously enough said nothing either in praise or blame.
"He is exactly the right age," insisted Gladys--as though somebody had
said he was not--"the age when a man is most interesting."
The Minster twins twiddled their legs and looked sentimentally at the
ocean. They were a pair of pink and white little things with china-blue
eyes and the fairest of hair, and they were very impressionable; and
when they thought of Selwyn they looked unutterable things at the
Atlantic Ocean.
One man, often the least suitable, is usually the unanimous choice of
the younger sort where, in the disconcerting summer time, the youthful
congregate in garrulous segregation.
Their choice they expressed frankly and innocently; they admitted
cheerfully that Selwyn was their idol. But that gentleman remained
totally unconscious that he had been set up by them upon the shores of
the summer sea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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