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By Root 9137 0

summer it was mostly the hope of seeing the Thurlows that made Dick not mind going to work at the Bayview where Mrs. Higgins gave him the job of room-clerk with an increase of pay on account of his gentlemanly manners. Dick was sixteen and his voice was changing; he had dreams about things with girls and thought a lot about sin and had a secret crush on Spike Culbertson, the yel owhaired captain of his school bal team. He hated everything about his life, his aunt and the smel of her boarding house, the thought of his father, his mother's flowergarden hats, not having enough money to buy good clothes or go to fashionable summerresorts like the other fel ows did. Al kinds of things got him terribly agitated so that it was hard not to show it. The wabble of the wait-resses'

hips and breasts while they were serving meals, girls' underwear in store windows, the smel of the bath-houses and the salty tingle of a wet bathingsuit and the

-80-tanned skin of fel ows and girls in bathingsuits lying out in the sun on the beach. He'd been writing Edwin and Hilda long letters al

winter about anything that came into his head, but when he actual y gaw them he felt funny and constrained. Hilda was using a new kind of perfume that tickled his nose; even when he was sitting at the table at lunch with them, eating cold ham and potato salad from the delicatessen and talking about the primitive litanies and gregorian music he couldn't help undressing them in his mind, think-ing of them in bed naked; he hated the way he felt. Sunday afternoons Edwin went to Elberon to conduct

services in another little summer chapel. Hilda never went and often invited Dick to go out for a walk with her or come to tea. He and Hilda began to have a little world between them that Edwin had nothing to do with, where they only talked about him to poke fun at him. Dick began to see Hilda in his queer horrid dreams. Hilda began to talk about how she and Dick were real y brother and sister, how passionless people who never real y wanted anything couldn't understand people like them. Those times Dick didn't get much chance to say anything. He and Hilda would sit on the back stoop in the shade smoking Egyptian Deities until they felt a little sick. Hilda'd say she didn't care whether the damn parishioners saw her or not and talk and talk about how she wanted something to happen in her life, and smart clothes and to travel to foreign countries and to have money to spend and not to have to fuss with the housekeeping and how she felt sometimes she could kil Edwin for his mild calfish manner.

Edwin usual y got back on a train that got in at 10:53

and, as Dick had Sunday evenings off from the hotel, he and Hilda would eat supper alone together and then take a walk along the beach. Hilda would take his arm and walk close to him; he'd wonder if she felt him tremble whenever their legs touched.

-81-Al week he'd think about those Sunday evenings. Some-times he'd tel himself that he wouldn't go another time. He'd stay up in his room and read Dumas or go out with fel ows he knew; being alone with Hilda like that made him feel too rotten afterwards. Then one moonless night, when they'd walked way down the beach beyond the rosy fires of the picnickers, and were sitting side by side on the sand talking about India's Love Lyrics that Hilda had been reading aloud that afternoon, she suddenly jumped on him and mussed up his hair and stuck her knees into his stomach and began to run her hands over his body under his shirt. She was strong for a girl, but he'd just managed to push her off when he had to grab her by the shoulders and pul her down on top of him. They neither of them said anything but lay there in the sand breathing hard. At last she whispered, "Dick, I mustn't have a baby. . . . We can't afford it. . . . That's why Edwin won't sleep with me. Damn it, I want you, Dick. Don't you see how awful it al is?" While she was talking her hands were burning him, moving down across his chest, over his ribs, around the curve of his bel y. "Don't, Hilda, don't." There were mosquitoes