Note 46 — Chapter Twenty-nine
Reading edition
I can recall little in Dave’s boyhood that pointed to what was later to become his capacity for public life. On the contrary, he was a peculiarly diffident lad, never thrusting himself to the fore, unless impelled to do so by the violence of the urge of an idea.
He was stiff, even gawkish with girls. His encounter with Kenneth Chipman, Dora Tarkington, and the dog, told elsewhere in this willy-nilly journal of mine, gives some idea of his adolescent aplomb where the fair sex was concerned.
In a lifetime that was to be crowded with public addresses of the most portentous kind, he has repeatedly told of himself, in the privacy of a family-dinner, and to our reminiscent merriment, that he never approached any rostrum with drier throat or stiffer tongue than he experienced on a certain Saturday afternoon, when he directed his footsteps toward the Tarkington place for his first formal visit to Dora.