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“Boasting’s the vulgarest thing there is,” the fair young girl, Josephine, informed her three guests as they came out of the big brick Oaklin house after lunch. “Boasting’s practically the same thing as bragging, and both are incredibly vulgar.”

The guests, two girls and a boy, all three of their hostess’s age, fourteen, were already depressed, though well fed, and they became gloomier as she used what they thought a show-off word. “ ‘Incredibly,’ ” the boy repeated. “That’s about the hundredth time to-day you’ve said something was ‘incredibly,’ Josephine. You’ve said about a thousand things were ‘vulgar,’ too. Besides that, you can deny it all you want to; but you were boasting or bragging, or both or whatever you call it, just as I taxed you with.”

“I did not!” young Josephine cried. “You’re incredibly mistaken! There! I’ll say it as frequently as I wish to and I’d like to see you endeavor to stop me because I’ll throw you down and rub your face in the grass if you do, the way I did yesterday. Want me to show Ella and Sophie I can?”

In heated response he used an expression still permissible to youthful fashion that year, 1932. “Can it! Can that stuff!” Young Josephine Oaklin, slim from small feet to broad shoulders, was an athlete and as precociously active bodily as she was mentally. Jamie Elliston well knew she’d not hesitate to manhandle him. “Go on and incredibly yourself sick,” he said. “It’ll sure be swell, so have yourself a time. I’m through objecting.”

“ ‘Sure’! ‘Swell’!” Josephine taunted him gayly. “Those two foul old words are fifty percent of your vocabulary, my dear. The other fifty consists of ‘guy’ and ‘gal’ and ‘can it.’ Take those away and you’d be denied all utterance.”

“Oh, I would? Then listen to this: Skip it, you heel! Suit you any better?”

Sophie and Ella, each boredly skewering a patent-leather toe into the newly April-green grass, looked on coldly. “Always tangling with the boy-friend, isn’t she?” Ella said. “I don’t deny you gave us a nice lunch, Josephine; but who couldn’t with all those servants, and if you think always picking on Jamie to prove he’s yours is interesting, it simply isn’t.”

“I’m not hers,” Jamie began. “I’m not any——”

Sophie agreed with Ella. “Yes, Josephine, you’re supposed to be having a luncheon party for us; but now we’ve eaten it, what do we do next?”

“Well, I’ll see; but there’s an important event going to happen here this afternoon.” Josephine made her pretty fourteen-year-old face as mysterious as she could. “Of course I don’t mean anything important about you three or anything like that. The importance is going to be on the adult scale. It’s essential I keep within call of the house, so we can’t go anywhere else, soda-fountaining or anything. Fortunately we’ve got plenty of room to do whatever I decide till I get called in, since our yard happens to be the only one in town that comprises a full block.”

“Oh, no! No vulgar boasting or bragging!” The Elliston boy became loudly sarcastic. “Never missed a chance yet to holler you got a yard that covers a whole block and’s got your family’s private art gallery in it besides the house and all the old bushes and trees! Listen, what’s this adult scale you claim you’re going to mix up with? Adult scale! That’s a cute one.”

Josephine moved toward him dangerously. “Asking to get your nose rubbed in the grass?”

He backed away. “You let me alone!”

Josephine leaped, caught him about his middle, threw him and did what she had threatened; but her two other guests remained apathetic. “If you think you’re giving Sophie and me a good time at your luncheon party,” Ella said, “you’re mistaken, Josephine. Can’t you two lovers do anything but fight? It’s pretty boresome for us spectators.”

Jamie Elliston, prone, cried out thickly against the word “lovers,” whereupon Miss Oaklin rubbed the grass with his face again; then let him rise. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” she said. “I’ll show you three some new basketball shots I’ve worked up. Come on.”

She ran ahead and they followed slowly round the wide house. Jamie, muttering morosely, used a white handkerchief upon his face and the green-stained knees of his trousers. “Doesn’t care whose clothes she destroys! Got a basket in front the side wall of their old art gallery. Wants to show us she can make more baskets than we can, just because your old Miss Murray’s School for Girls’ basketball team’s got her for its captain.”

“You’re not up to the minute, Jamie,” Ella informed him. “Nobody can deny she’s a good player and everybody thought the team’d elect her captain this year; but the girls on it all simply declined and elected Amy Keller instead.”

“Good!” Jamie cheered up a little. “So our proud and mighty old gal’s just a humble member of the team.”

“Not so humble,” Ella said. “Practises hour after hour all alone by herself so’s to prove even if she isn’t captain she’s anyhow the best.”

They’d come round the house to an open space before a building of pale limestone, the “old art gallery.” It wasn’t old. Jamie had used the term in the instinctive manner of the young, for whom “old” naturally defines anything uninteresting, difficult or contemptible. Attached to the Tudorish brick house by a stone passageway, the skylighted gallery, a single story high and windowless on this side, made a convenient backstop. Josephine was already poised with a ball in the center of the open space and facing a “basket” set up before the wall.

“Watch this shot!” she called. “Notice the new way I use my wrist and——”

Ella interrupted her drearily. “What’s the use your having that four-thousand-dollar tennis court back yonder? There are four of us and we could all get our rubber-soles and——”

“No. The court’s covered on account of spring rains. You watch this shot; it’s different. Zing!” As adroit as she was graceful, Josephine “shot” the ball accurately. “Basket! Got a basket! Run get the ball for me, Jamie; I appoint you my retriever.” She glanced at his face, and laughed. “What’s the matter? Insulted speechless again?”

The discontented Ella made another protest. “Josephine, is it entertaining guests they just get to stand around while you shoot baskets? Hostesses are supposed to afford pleasure from the background, aren’t they?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Josephine said, assuming a confidential air. “I haven’t got much time to think up anything until later. You see, this important event on the adult scale I mentioned may begin to take place almost any instant and I’ve got my mother on my mind because she’s out at a big female luncheon at the Country Club. She always gets absorbed, especially if there’s contract; but I impressed and impressed it on her that she had to be on time. She ought to be here right now and I can’t get a second’s peace of mind till I see her car on our driveway.”

Jamie Elliston spoke with pain. “ ‘Impressed it’! ‘Impressed it on my mother’!”

“She does,” Sophie told him. “That’s exactly what she does. Josephine absolutely runs her mother. Everybody in town knows Mrs. Oaklin does everything Josephine tells her to.”

Josephine listened to this with a matter-of-course complacency; then “I hear a car now!” she cried, and ran back by the way she’d come. When she reached a corner of the house she stopped and looked toward a porte-cochère that sheltered a side entrance. There a taxicab had just halted; a preoccupied man carrying two thick brief-cases stepped out, rang the doorbell and disappeared within the house. The taxicab drove on till it reached a graveled space before a large brick garage at the end of the driveway. The driver stopped his car, lighted a cigarette and waited. Josephine ran back to her guests.

“It’s commencing,” she said. “Mr. Oscar Glessit’s got here. He’s Grandfather’s lawyer; but look, I’ve got a little time left, so I can show you some more of my shots. When I haf to go in the house the rest of you can practise ’em till I come out again, so it stands to reason I’ll do all the shooting up to then. Fetch me the ball, Sophie, since the princely Mr. Elliston’s so ungracious about it.”

Sophie Tremoille went for the ball. “Oh, all right!” she said almost admiringly, as she brought it. “Always got to have your way! You think everybody else are just your mere attendants, don’t you?”

“Well——” Josephine laughed, and in this contortion her daintily shaped features were prettier than ever. “You ought to keep remembering who I am, oughtn’t you?”

“Well, honest to gosh!” This was Jamie appealing to Ella. “She means it!”

He was right. Young Josephine laughed, amused by her own egregiousness; but she did mean it.