"He has good company! It is queer for such an educated one to like such a dumb one! Perhaps Essie will get him to convert himself. She was here to get me to convert myself. She says it is while I am wicked that this trouble comes upon me. She wanted to sit by my gran'mom and talk about my gran'mom's sins, and I told her my gran'mom hadn't as many sins in her whole life as she had already." Katy could not suppress a giggle. "That settled her. I wouldn't even let her go up. I wanted to choke her."
Again Katy sat silently. Alvin was here, she was consuming the time in foolish talk; at any minute Bevy might descend from above or they might be interrupted by a visitor. Alvin moved uneasily. Perhaps he, too, felt this talk to be foolish. The light fell full upon his red tie and the beautiful line of his young throat. A more mature and experienced person than Katy Gaumer would have been certain that there must be good in a creature so beautiful.
"David can go to college," he said mournfully. "But I cannot go anywhere, not even to the normal school where I could learn to be a teacher. I thought I would surely get that much of an education, but there is no hope for me."
Katy turned and looked at him. "Why no hope?"
"Why, they say in Millerstown that you are not going to school. You said that when you went to school you would find a way for me to go. But if you are not going, then there is no one to help me. And pop"--Alvin's lapses into the vernacular were frequent--"pop gets worse and worse. He is going very fast behind. He is getting so he has queer ideas. He was making him shoelaces with the ravelings of the carpet. And he thinks there is now a woman with horns after him. He talks about it all the time. I have nothing in this world. When he was so bad I came to tell you. It was then I whistled."
"You do not need any one at the school to help you," said Katy in a clear voice. "If I am not going, I can all the better help you to go; don't you see that, Alvin? If you are going to teach, you do not have to pay anything except for board and room. I have two hundred dollars in the bank, and I can lend you some to begin with and then you can get something to do. I will give you fifty dollars"--poor Katy planned as though she had thousands. "There is a little hole round the corner of the house in the wall, where Bevy used to put the cakes for me. There I will put the money for you, Alvin."