store on a side street, our sole frequenting-place. Here we
bought our cigarettes, and, occasionally, a nickel's worth of
"red-hots." (Oh, yes; Louis and I unblushingly ate candy--all we
could get. Neither of us drank. Neither of us ever went into a
saloon.)

But the girl. In quite primitive fashion, as Louis advised me, I
was to select her and make myself acquainted with her. We
strolled the streets in the early evenings. The girls, like us,
strolled in pairs. And strolling girls will look at strolling
boys who look. (And to this day, in any town, city, or village,
in which I, in my middle age, find myself, I look on with the eye
trained of old experience, and watch the sweet innocent game
played by the strolling boys and girls who just must stroll when
the spring and summer evenings call.)

The trouble was that in this Arcadian phase of my history, I, who
had come through, case-hardened, from the other side of life, was
timid and bashful. Again and again Louis nerved me up. But I
didn't know girls. They were strange and wonderful to me after my
precocious man's life. I failed of the bold front and the
necessary forwardness when the crucial moment came.

Then Louis would show me how--a certain, eloquent glance of eye, a
smile, a daring, a lifted hat, a spoken word, hesitancies,
giggles, coy nervousnesses--and, behold, Louis acquainted and
nodding me up to be introduced. But when we paired off to stroll
along boy and girl together, I noted that Louis had invariably
picked the good-looker and left to me the little lame sister.