An Idyll of All Fools' Day

'TWAS a bloomy morning, all crocuses and tree buds, and Antony sniffed it into his nostrils thankfully, even while he scowled.

"Come, come!" said his Uncle Julius, a wealthy old gentleman buttoned firmly into a white vest, "what a face! It is nothing so terrible that I ask of you! One would think it a hanging matter, to beau a pretty young girl about the place!"

"You know that I do not care for schoolgirls, Uncle Julius," said Antony severely.

"Fiddlestick!" his Uncle Julius cried, "and what are you sir, but a school boy, I should like to know? What shall we hear next, I wonder?"

Antony put on some fresh grey gloves with a sigh.

"Schoolgirl! Schoolgirl!" his uncle repeated mimickingly, "she will not be reciting her lessons, I suppose!"

Antony buttoned his gloves.

"Or if she does, it will be your fault, sir," pursued his uncle.

Antony selected a slender walking stick from a rack of many, and reviewed his collar with a critical hand.

"The young lady's topics of conversation will be a matter of indifference to me, Uncle Julius," said he, "I assure you."

"And I assure you," cried Uncle Julius, "that if we were not on this open porch, I should be strongly tempted to apply that stick of yours where, as we used to say, it would do the most good!"

Antony adjusted his coat trimly and started down the steps.

"But since we are upon this open porch, let us, Uncle Julius," said he, "go where duty calls us. En avant!"

He strode along the flagged walk with Uncle Julius puffing behind him, loquaciously indignant.

"Look at your mates, sir, as we pass them, and notice how enviously they smile," he urged the youth, who replied shortly that he observed them.

"In my time, I can tell you," said Uncle Julius, "there was no shilly shallying in these matters. We had more blood. Let any college lad be given a free day--and a fine day, too--and one of the prettiest girls that ever wore a petticoat to enjoy It with him, and he was the envy of all his fellows. And I believe," he ended with a fine optimism, "that it is so now! Not one of these lads but would change places with you at a nod."

"But you will not nod, my dear Uncle Julius," Antony responded calmly, "and so these lads--as you so felicitously call them--will never lose the opportunity I would cheerfully relin----"

"Hush! there she is!" his uncle whispered, and Antony at once removed his hat with a lordly and accomplished gesture, which Uncle Julius noted with unwilling admiration.

"Well, here we are!" he said, with an attempt at prankish levity in which he received no assistance from Antony. "Here we are at last, Nette dear, dressed in our best for you!"

"So I see. And this is, I suppose, your young nephew, Mr. Julius?" said the person at whose face Antony had not yet looked.

If she had intended to remedy this omission she could not have devised a more efficacious means. Not only did Antony look at her: he stared. From the topmost strand of her braided chestnut hair to the lowest dimple In her olive cheek--for she was of that irritatingly attractive class of females that combines deep-set violet eyes with a gipsy colouring--every curve of her audacious body spelled youth, unmitigated youth, and her tone was correspondingly insulting.

"I am truly pleased to meet you," he said with the air of one to whom experience has lent tolerance.

"I should truly never have guessed it," she returned promptly with an amused smile.

Antony flushed. An impudent chit, this. A girl to be taught her place, and that right early.

"I am to have, I believe," he said, with a fine air of disregard for any previous conversation, "the honour of escort--of show--of, er, of entertaining you for the day."

"That distinction is indeed yours," she replied gravely, "I have no doubt that I shall be escort--show--er, entertained most agreeably."

With this insulting remark she but half concealed a yawn and Antony's blood boiled within him.

"Come," chirped Uncle Julius with a fatuous chuckle, "we are getting along famously! What did I tell you? Yes, indeed!"

To this idiotic speech neither his nephew nor that nephew's new acquaintance made any further reply than two eloquent but totally ineffective glances. They were ineffective because the glance as a medium of expression had not been included in Uncle Julius's aesthetic training.

"And what are you going to do first, hey? Where does the great day begin--see the town sights, I suppose?" this Imbecile old relative maundered on.

"It will give me great pleasure, if she wishes to see them," said Antony coldly, "to point out the various objects of local interest to Miss----"

"Good gracious!" Uncle Julius interrupted, "what's come over the boy? 'Miss,' indeed! Didn't I tell you that this is my old godmother's own daughter's stepdaughter? 'Miss!' Her name is Nette."

"Ah," said Antony.

"And his," continued Uncle Julius, with a flip of his finger at his nephew and a wink at the young lady, "is Tony. Let's have no formality among chicks of your age. No, no; Tony's his name."

"Indeed!" the young lady observed, gazing critically at the embarrassed possessor of the cognomen, "and a quaint little name, I am sure."

She smiled with a perfunctory brightness and continued in some inexplicable manner to look down at her escort--though had she been presented with ten thousand dollars for every one of the inches over five feet in her height she would not have appeared before the world as any considerable heiress. The object of this remarkably achieved envisagement writhed inwardly. Uncle Julius rubbed his hands in maudlin delight at her appreciation of his nephew's baptismal acquirements, and she continued, prettily stifling a second yawn between her white little pointed teeth:

"Since our young friend naturally pants to show us the beauties of his Alma Mater, let us by all means begin with them," and get them over, said the strangled yawn.

Antony bit his tongue in his seething rage and the pain turned him crimson and wet-eyed. This did not escape the intolerable chit and her deep-set violet eyes twinkled maliciously.

"It will not be at all necessary to see"--he began, when Uncle Julius's round, astonished eyes interrupted them.

"He is not going to show 'us' at all," explained this worthy but misguided man, "he is going to show you, my dear. I knew all these sights well forty years ago. Dear, dear! yes, indeed."