In hoarse whispers, Mrs. Milholland chided her husband for an exclamation he had uttered.  “John!  On Sunday!  You ought to be ashamed.”

“I couldn’t help it,” he exclaimed.  “Who on earth is his clinging vine?  Why, she’s got lavender tops on her shoes and—­”

“Don’t look round!” she warned him sharply.  “Don’t—­”

“Well, what’s he doing at a Baptist church?  What’s he fidgeting at his handkerchief about?  Why can’t he walk like people?  Does he think it’s obligatory to walk home from church anchored arm-in-arm like Swedes on a Sunday Out?  Who is this cow-eyed fat girl that’s got him, anyhow?”

“Hush!  Don’t look round again, John.”

“Never fear!” said her husband, having disobeyed.  “They’ve turned off; they’re crossing over to Bullard Street.  Who is it?”

“I think her name’s Rust,” Mrs. Milholland informed him.  “I don’t know what her father does.  She’s one of the girls in his class at school.”

“Well, that’s just like a boy; pick out some putty-faced flirt to take to church!”

“Oh, she’s quite pretty—­in that way!” said his wife, deprecatingly.  “Of course that’s the danger with public schools.  It would be pleasanter if he’d taken a fancy to someone whose family belongs to our own circle.”

“’Taken a fancy’!” he echoed, hooting.  “Why, he’s terrible!  He looked like a red-gilled goldfish that’s flopped itself out of the bowl.  Why, he—­”

“I say I wish if he felt that he had to take girls anywhere,” said Mrs. Milholland, with the primmest air of speaking to the point—­“if this sort of thing must begin, I wish he might have selected some nice girl among the daughters of our own friends, like Dora Yocum, for instance.”

Upon the spot she began to undergo the mortification of a mother who has expected her son, just out of infancy, to look about him with the eye of a critical matron of forty-five.  Moreover, she was indiscreet enough to express her views to Ramsey, a week later, producing thus a scene of useless great fury and no little sound.

“I do think it’s in very poor taste to see so much of any one girl, Ramsey,” she said, and, not heeding his protest that he only walked home from school with Milla, “about every other day,” and that it didn’t seem any crime to him just to go to church with her a couple o’ times, Mrs. Milholland went on:  “But if you think you really must be dangling around somebody quite this much—­though what in the world you find to talk about with this funny little Milla Rust you poor father says he really cannot see—­and of course it seems very queer to us that you’d be willing to waste so much time just now when your mind ought to be entirely on your studies, and especially with such an absurd looking little thing—­