The Folded Leaf Read Online Free

of, without anybody’s minding it. After all, that was how it was done. Ray Snyder and Irma Hartnell and Lester Adams had all had to stand around on the outside before they were taken in. But Lymie didn’t try.
    He was too proud perhaps and at the same time too uncertain of himself. The fact that his legs were too thin for him to wear knickers may have had something to do with it; or that he had no set of remarks. Also, the one time that he had screwed up his courage to ask a girl for a date, she had refused him. Considering how popular Peggy Johnston was, he should have asked her at least two days before he did. She said she was awfully sorry but she was going to the Edgewater Beach Hotel that night with Bob Edwards, and Lymie believed her. It wasn’t that he doubted her word. But deep down inside of him he knew as he hung up the phone what would have happened if he’d called earlier. And because he still carried that heavy knowledge around with him, when he got abreast of LeClerc’s big plate glass window he looked in and saw everything there was to see but kept right on walking.
    Perhaps it was just as well; Lymie was only fifteen.
    But why, since he was so proud and in many ways older than his years, did he let himself be drawn into the Venetian Candy Shop farther up the street and come out half a minute later with a large red taffy apple and proceed to smear his whole face up with it, in public, walking along the street?

5
    M rs. Latham reached up and turned on the bridge lamp at her elbow, though it was still daylight outside, and the lamplight fell upon her lap, which was overflowing with curtain material. There were piles of it on the sofa and on the floor around her, and it was hard to believe all this white net could hang from the four living room windows that now were bare and looked out on a park.
    She sat with her back not quite touching the back of the big upholstered chair and her head bent over her sewing. In shadow her face was expressive and full of character but when the light shone directly on it, although the features remained the same, it seemed wan. It was the face of a woman who might be unwell. Her soft brown hair had very little gray in it and was done on top of her head in a way that had been fashionable when she was a girl. Anyone coming into the room and seeing her there in the pale yellow light would have found her very sympathetic, very appealing. Without having the least idea what was in her mind as she raised the spool to her lips and bit through the white cotton thread, he would have felt sure that she had been through a great deal; that she had given herself heart and soul to undertakings which ought to have turned outwell but hadn’t always; and that she was still, in all probability, an innocent person.
    Near the center of the park—it was no more than an open field with young elm trees set at regular intervals around the edge—boys were playing touchball. Their voices penetrated to the living room, through the closed windows. Mrs. Latham may or may not have heard them; she did not commit herself. A bakery truck passed in the street, and several cars, one of them choking and sputtering. The sound of footsteps on the cement walk caused Mrs. Latham to raise her head and listen. Whoever it was that she was expecting, this couldn’t have been the one, for she went back to her sewing immediately and did not even bother to look out.
    In spite of the solid row of front windows, the living room was dark. It was the fault of the wallpaper and of the furniture, which had obviously been acquired over many years, at no great expense, and perhaps even accidentally. There was barely enough of it here and there in the room to make it livable. A plain grayish-blue rug covered most of the floor. The sofa and the chair Mrs. Latham sat in were upholstered in a subdued green. There was a phonograph and three wooden chairs, none of them wholly comfortable. The table was mission, with a piece of