Part 26 (1/2)

”But you could get it any time now,” argued the man.

Helplessly she threw out the palms of her hands and the unexpected gesture displayed an amazing slimness and whiteness of wrist.

”Stupid!” she laughed. ”What would I do with a pink sash now?”

Ruthlessly her quick eyes traveled down the full length of her scant, rough skirt to the stubbed toes of her battered brown riding boots.

”Dust on the highway and chalk in the cla.s.sroom and 'grown-up-ness'

everywhere!” she persisted dully. ”That's the real tragedy of growing up--not that we outgrow our original desires, but that retaining those desires, we outgrow the ability to find satisfaction in them. People ought to think of that, you know, when they thwart a child's ten-cent pa.s.sion for a tin trumpet. Fifty years later, when that child is a bank president, it may drive him almost crazy to have a toy-shop with a whole window-full of tin trumpets come and cuddle right next door to his bank--and nothing that the man can do with them!”

Like a little gray veil the tired look fell again over her face. The man saw it and shuddered.

”Psychology is my subject at Varndon College, you know,” she continued listlessly, ”and so I suppose I'm rather specially interested in freakish mental things. Anyway--pink sashes or Noah's arks or enough sugar in your cocoa--I have a theory that no child ever does outgrow its ungratified legitimate desires; though subsequent maturity may bring him to the point where his original desire has reached such astounding proportions that the original object can no longer possibly appease it.”

Reminiscently, her narrowing eyes turned back their inner vision to the far-away grotesque incident of the camp meeting. ”It isn't as though a child asked for a thing the very first time that he thought of it,” she protested a trifle pathetically. ”An idea has been sown and has grown and germinated in his mind a pretty long time before he gets up his courage to speak to anybody about it. Oh, I tell you, sir, the time to grant anybody a favor is the day the favor is asked, for that day is the one psychological moment of the world when supply and demand are keyed exactly to each other's limits, and can be mated beatifically to grow old, or die young, together. But after that day--!

”Why, even with grown people,” she added hastily. ”Did you ever know a marriage to turn out to be specially successful where the man had courted a reluctant woman for years and years before she finally yielded to him? It's perfectly astonis.h.i.+ng how soon a wife like that is forced to mourn: 'Why did he court me so long and so furiously if he really cared as little as this? I'm just exactly the same person that I was in the beginning!'--Yes, that's precisely the trouble. In the long time that she has kept her man waiting, she has remained just exactly the same small object that she was in the beginning, but the man's hunger for her has materialized and spiritualized and idealized a thousandfold beyond her paltry capacity to satisfy it.”

”That's a funny way to look at it,” mused Donas Guthrie.

”Is it?” said the young woman, a trifle petulantly. ”It doesn't seem funny to me!”

Then to Guthrie's infinite astonishment and embarra.s.sment the tears welled up suddenly into her eyes and she turned her head abruptly away and began to beat a nervous tattoo with one hand on the flimsy piazza railing.

In the moment's awkward silence that ensued, the little inn's clattery kitchen wafted up its pleasant, odorous, noon-day suggestion of coffee and bacon.

”W-h-e-w!” gloated Guthrie desperately, ”but that smells good!”

”It doesn't smell good to me,” said the young woman tartly.

With a definite thud the tilting leg of Guthrie's chair came whacking down on the piazza floor.

”Why, you inconsistent little gourmand!” he exclaimed. ”Then why did you give 'one perfectly good dinner' a place on your list of necessities?”

”I don't know,” whispered the young woman, a trifle tremulously. Then abruptly she burst out laughing, and the face that she turned to Guthrie again was all deliciously mussed up like a child's, with tears and smiles and breeze-blown wisps of hair.

”That dinner item was just another silly thing,” she explained half bashfully, half defiantly. ”It's only that although I practically never eat much of anything on ordinary occasions, whenever I get into any kind of danger, whenever the train runs off the track, or the steamer threatens to sink, or my car gets stuck in the subway, I'm seized with the most terrific gnawing hunger--as though--as though--” Furiously the red flushed into her face again. ”Well--eternity sounds so l-long,” she stammered, ”and I have a perfect horror, somehow--of going to Heaven--on an empty stomach.”

In mutual appreciation of a suddenly relaxed tension, the man's laughter and the woman's rang out together throughout the dooryard and startled a grazing pony into a whimpering whinny of sympathy.

”I knew you'd think my list was funny,” protested the young woman. ”I knew perfectly well that every single individual item on it would astonish you.”

Meditatively Donas Guthrie refilled his pipe and evidently illuminated both the tobacco and the situation with the same match.

”It isn't the things that are on your list that astonish me,” he remarked puffingly. ”It's the things that aren't on it that have given me the bit of a jolt.”

”Such as what?” frowned the young woman, sliding jerkily out to the edge of her chair.

”Why, I'd always supposed that women were inherently domestic,” growled Guthrie. ”I'd always somehow supposed that Love and Home would figure pretty largely on any woman's 'List of Necessities.' But you! For Heaven's sake, haven't you ever even thought of man in any specific relation to your own life?”

”No, except in so far as he might r.e.t.a.r.d my accomplishment of the things on my list,” she answered frankly. Out of the gray film of pipe-smoke, her small face loomed utterly serene, utterly honest, utterly devoid of coquetry or self-consciousness.

”Any man would be apt to 'r.e.t.a.r.d' your desire to stroke a lion's face,”