Back Next Contents. When Sarah Wendell had agreed to go out with David Bartley, it had seemed like a good idea at the time. She had totally forgotten that she was months away from her sixteenth birthday. The Wendell house rule was no dating till sixteen. Remembering that little detail hadn't been a problem when other boys asked her out, as several had in the last few months.
David had his own version of the Delia effect. You sort of felt you were more grownup if you did what the adults wanted. Mostly David's thing worked in business matters, but this time the switch between working out how to finance the twins' scheme and his asking her out had come too quickly. David wasn't allowed to date till he was sixteen either, and he knew she wasn't. Knowing David, there was no way he had done it on purpose. It was kind of nice to know that she was as capable of making him forget that sort of thing as he was of making her forget them.
Similar thoughts occupied David's mind. In his anxiety over how Sarah would react, he had forgotten that it wasn't entirely up to her. Apparently she had, too. When you spent half your time runningβwell, helping runβwhat was rapidly turning into a multimillion-dollar business, you tended to forget that you weren't old enough to date or set your own bedtime.
David had spent most weekends since the merger traveling to nearby towns to set up Higgins Sewing Machine Company franchises. It was amazing the number of villages that dotted this part of Germany. It had come as a surprise since the Ring of Fire that the seventeenth century was so well populated. So a great deal of his time these days was spent sitting down with merchants or master craftsmen two to three times his age, explaining to them how to deal with rent with an option to buy payment plans and other intricacies of adding a sewing machine outlet to their other businesses.
Then there were the two times he had had to revoke a franchise agreement because the holder didn't realize that they meant it when they talked about a policy of honesty and fair dealing. He wasn't exactly in charge of any of that. Truth to tell, he was sort of Karl Schmidt's tame up-timer, sort of physical proof of Karl's up-timer connection. Still, he was involved, and did have a say.
