I was treated with a greater deference at the school, and Elizabeth Allen invited me to her party, to which, however, I had not the courage to go, having no idea what happened to one at a village party.
I asked a boy in my Latin class to tell me.
"Oh, ye just fly around an' kiss and git kissed till ye feel like a fool." That settled it for me.

Not that I would have failed to enjoy kissing Sally, but we were out, as they used to say, and it would have embarrassed both of us to meet at a party.
Saturday came and, when the chores were done, I went alone to the grain barn in the back lot of the Senator's farm with flail and measure and broom and fork and shovel and sacks and my luncheon, in a push cart, with all of which Mrs.Wright had provided me.
It was a lonely place with woods on three sides of the field and a road on the other.

I kept laying down beds of wheat on the barn-floor and beating them out with the flail until the sun was well over the roof when I sat down to eat my luncheon.

Then I swept up the grain and winnowed out the chaff and filled one of my sacks.

That done, I covered the floor again and the thump of the flail eased my loneliness until in the middle of the afternoon two of my schoolmates came and asked me to go swimming, with them.