The Progress of Love

they could not accept.
    If Callie watched, it was from behind windows. She always had her work.
    Miss Kernaghan said that so much exercise would give those boys terrible appetites.
    When Sam thought of himself and Edgar practicing in that vacant lot—it was now part of the Canadian Tire parking space—he always seemed to be sitting on the porch, too, looking at the two boys striving and falling and pulling themselves up on the grass—one figure soaring briefly above the other, triumphantly hand-balanced—and then the cheerful separate tumbling. These memories have a certain damp brown shading. Perhaps from the wallpaper in the Kernaghan house. The trees that lined the road at that time were elms, and their leaf color in fall was a brown-spotted gold.The leaves were shaped like a candle flame. These leaves fell in his mind on a windless evening with the sky clear but the sunset veiled and the countryside misty. The town, under leaves and the smoke of burning leaves, was mysterious and difficult, a world on its own, with its church spires and factory whistles, rich houses and row houses, networks, catchwords, vested interests. He had been warned; he had been told town people were snotty. That was not the half of it.
    The exercise did increase the Grazier boys’ appetites, but those would have been terrible anyway. They were used to farm meals and had never imagined people could exist on such portions as were served here. They saw with amazement that Miss Verne left half of what little she got on her plate, and that Alice Peel rejected potatoes, bread, bacon, cocoa as a threat to her figure; turnips, cabbage, beans as a threat to her digestion; and anything with raisins in it simply because she couldn’t stand them. They could not figure out any way to get what Alice Peel turned down or what Miss Verne left on her plate, though it would surely have been fair.
    At ten-thirty in the evening, Miss Kernaghan produced what she called “the evening lunch.” This was a plate of sliced bread, some butter and jam, and cups of cocoa or tea. Coffee was not served in that house. Miss Kernaghan said it was American and corroded your gullet. The butter was cut up beforehand into meager pats, and the dish of jam was set in the middle of the table, where nobody could reach it easily. Miss Kernaghan remarked that sweet things spoiled the taste of bread and butter. The other boarders deferred to her out of long habit, but between them Sam and Edgar cleaned out the dish. Soon the amount of jam dwindled to two separate spoonfuls. The cocoa was made with water, with a little skim milk added to make a skin and to support Miss Kernaghan’s claim that it was made with milk entirely.
    Nobody challenged her. Miss Kernaghan told lies not to fool people but to stump them. If a boarder said, “It was a bit chilly upstairs last night,” Miss Kernaghan would say at once, “I can’t understand that. I had a roaring fire going. The pipes were too hot to lay your hand on them.” The fact of the matter would be thatshe had let the fire die down or go out altogether. The boarder would know or strongly suspect this, but what was a boarder’s suspicion against Miss Kernaghan’s firm, flashy lie? Mrs. Cruze would actually apologize, Miss Verne would mutter about her chilblains, Mr. Delahunt and Alice Peel would look sulky but would not argue.
    Sam and Edgar had to spend their whole allowance of pocket money, which wasn’t much, on food. At first they got hot dogs at the Cozy Grill. Then Sam figured out that they would be farther ahead buying a package of jam tarts or Fig Newtons at the grocery store. They had to eat the whole package on the way home, because of the rule about no food in the bedrooms, They liked the hot dogs, but they had never felt really comfortable at the Cozy Grill, which was full of noisy high-school students, younger and a lot brassier than they were. Sam felt some possibility of insult, though none ever developed. On the way back to Kernaghan’s from the grocery store, they had to pass the Cozy Grill and then Dixon’s, a drugstore with an ice-cream parlor in the back. That was where their fellow-students from the business college went for cherry Cokes and banana splits after school and in the evenings. Passing Dixon’s windows, they stopped chewing, looked stolidly straight ahead. They would never go inside.
    They were the only farm boys at business college, and their clothes set them apart. They had no light-blue