Why had he listened to Tempy at all? She didn’t know Pansetta, and just because her mother worked out in service she wanted him to snub the girl. What was that to be afraid of—her mother not being home after school? Even if Pansetta would let him go in the house with her and put his arms around her and love her, why shouldn’t he? Didn’t he have a right to have a girl like that, as well as the other fellows? Didn’t he have a right to be free with women, too, like all the rest of the young men? . . . But Pansetta wasn’t that kind of girl! . . . What made his mind run away with him? Because of what Tempy had said? . . . To hell with Tempy!

“She’s just an old-fashioned darky Episcopalian, that’s what Tempy is! And she wanted me to drop Pansetta because her mother doesn’t belong to the Dunbar Whist Club. Gee, but I’m ashamed of myself. I’m a cad and a snob, that’s all I am, and I’m going to apologize.” Subconsciously he was living over a scene from an English novel he had read at the printing-shop, in which the Lord dropped the Squire’s daughter for a great Lady, but later returned to his first love. Sandy retained the words “cad” and “snob” in his vocabulary, but he wasn’t thinking of the novel now. He really believed, after three weeks of seeing Pansetta walking with other boys, that he had done wrong, and that Tempy was the villainess in the situation. It was worrying him a great deal; he decided to make up with Pansetta if he could.

One Friday afternoon she left school with a great armful of books. They had to write an English composition for Monday and she had taken some volumes from the school library for reference. He might have offered to carry them for her, but he hadn’t. Instead he went to work—and there had been no other colored boys on the corner waiting for her as she went out. Now he could have kicked himself for his neglect, he thought, as he cleaned the rear room of Mr. Prentiss’s gift-card shop. Suddenly he dropped the broom with which he was sweeping, grabbed his cap, and left the place, for the desire to make friends with Pansetta possessed him more fiercely than ever, and he no longer cared about his work.

“I’m going to see her right now,” he thought, “before I go home to supper. Gee, but I’m ashamed of the way I’ve treated her.”

On the way to Pansetta’s house the lawns looked fresh and green and on some of them tulips were blooming. The late afternoon sky was aglow with sunset. Little boys were out in the streets with marbles and tops, and little girls were jumping rope on the sidewalks. Workmen were coming home, empty dinner-pails in their hands, and a band of Negro laborers passed Sandy, singing softly together.