Joan and Co.
in contact any length of time as it was for him to breathe. He had
confessed several previous romances to her.
It was probable, then, that this was just another. She should have held
to that. But somehow it was difficult. She had not laughed when he
told her of his love. If she had given way to her emotions the chances
are she would have cried. She had found some new quality in his eyes
and his voice. Then she liked the way he stood square-shouldered when
she told him the naked truth. And actually, she had felt a sense of
possessing something rare and wonderful in the loyalty that prompted
him to his offer.
“I want you to feel you have some one always ready to call on.” So the
ladies of romance used to receive an oath of allegiance from their
knights.
Then to-day a note from him had come which she had read with misty
eyes. It was so direct and uncomplaining that it tightened her throat.
There was a great deal about Dicky that was likable. She could be
with him more than with any other man she knew, if only he would not
talk about love; because love meant something entirely different
from anything Dicky dreamed. It had to do with life. It had to do
with—adventure. It had to do with big, earnest things, with real
things, with heart-breaking things, perhaps. All of which Dicky knew
nothing about.
But, after reading his note twice, she sent down word to Sparrow that
she would be at home that day to Mr. Richard Burnett. If Sparrow felt
a certain sense of relief, it would be nothing surprising, because the
last time he had given his message to the man he had hesitated about
holding the door open as wide as usual.
Dicky did not come until after four, which was unfortunate, because she
had a very important appointment at four-thirty, and told him so almost
at once.
“You’re going out?” he inquired hopefully.
“No,” she replied with some embarrassment.
He concluded then that a milliner or something of the kind was
coming to the house; and that, if one looked far enough ahead, was
encouraging, because it suggested that she was preparing to go out
again.
So he sat down and talked with her about this thing and that very
rationally and good-naturedly, as he might have done a week ago. In
many ways he seemed more himself than he had for several weeks, because
she realized now that for some time he had not been exactly normal.
Then he gave a new turn to the conversation by observing:
“It must be mighty dull for you to be shut up in the house, Joan.”
And she answered, speaking the truth, “Only it isn’t, Dicky.”
“But what do you do with yourself all day?”
That was a difficult question to answer directly. From his point of
view she supposed she was not doing very much, because most of the
interest of these days came from within herself. And she could not very
well let him into the secret of her thoughts. So she answered:
“I don’t think I could make you understand, Dicky. Only truly it isn’t
stupid.”
He looked up with a frown.
“You don’t give me credit for understanding much of anything, do you,
Joan?”
“It isn’t that,” she tried to reassure him. “Only—supposing I don’t
understand myself very well?”
“I don’t think you do.”
“Then—”
“Oh, we’ll only get mixed up again if we go on like that,” he
interrupted. “Tell me something about this fellow you ran over.”
She looked frightened.
“I didn’t run _over_ him.” She shuddered. “Don’t make it any worse than
it is.”
“Well, you started to.”
“There’s a big difference.”
“I suppose there is,” he admitted. “Who is he?”
“Oh, I hope some day you can meet him. You’d like him, Dicky.”
“Perhaps.”
“He’s a Technology man and—”
“He’s what?”
“Technology.”
Dicky appeared concerned.
“I didn’t know that. Some one told me he was a ’bus driver.”
“Why, Dicky, he’s a wonderful fellow. He has invented something. Only
he’s very, very poor.”
“Inventors always are,” he nodded.
“And he has tried so hard to make his way. He—he was almost starving
when—”
She did not like to fill in the ellipsis.
“When you partly ran over him,” he suggested.
“It’s nothing to make fun about,” she warned.
“Go on.”
“And I’d met him before. I knew a cousin of his at college.”
“You did?”
“She was wonderful, too.”
“Runs in the family?”
“They are from out West.”
“Anywhere in particular out West?”
“From Montana.”
“Just Montana?”
He was laughing at her now, and she resented it—resented it with more
genuine feeling than she would have thought possible. Her lips closed
firmly.
“I shan’t tell you anything more about him,” she decided.
“Now, look here—” he protested, making his feet in some alarm.
“No, I mean it,” she replied.
“I was only fooling, Joan. I didn’t know—”
He was studying her face. She was in dead earnest. He knew that. He
always knew when she was in earnest.
“Good Heavens, Joan—” he began.
But she had risen too, and was holding out her hand.
“You must excuse me now,” she said. “It is almost half-past four.”
Dicky caught his breath.
“You’re going—back to him?” he demanded.
It was a foolish thing for him to say. He realized it the moment the
words were out of his mouth. He saw her toss up her head—saw her look
the princess.
“Must I account for my movements to you?” she asked.
“You know better, Joan,” he cut in quickly. “Only—”
“Good-bye,” she insisted.
He took her hand.
“I don’t care where you’re going or who it is you’re going to see; but
you’ll let me call again?”
“Do you think you’ve made yourself very agreeable?”
In holding her hand he held an advantage. She could not very well leave
until he let go.
“Next time—” he began.
“Oh, all right, Dicky; I’ll try you once more. Please let me go.”
So he let her go, and in an instant she had vanished—none too politely.
Sparrow opened the door. Dicky wondered if it would not be well to
inform the man of her promise to admit him again, in case she herself
forgot. Then other thoughts crowded in upon him, and he went down the
steps in a kind of daze.
CHAPTER IX
THE FIGHTING THINGS
When Joan came into Devons’s room, she found him propped up on the
pillows, staring at the brass clock on the mantel.
“You’re five minutes late,” he informed her.
It was so trivial a matter to mention that Nurse Ware, who sat in the
farther corner of the room knitting and trying to look both deaf and
dumb, involuntarily raised her eyes.
“I was delayed by a caller,” Joan explained.
Nurse Ware turned to face the window, and from that point on assumed
that she was somewhere else. As far as either Joan or Devons cared, she
might have been in Jericho.
“It’s curious,” said Devons, “how the more time you have on your hands
the closer you watch the clock. This last five minutes has seemed like
an hour.”
“You should have been reading,” she laughed.
“I was waiting for you to read.”
The color came to her cheeks.
“I am ready,” she answered.
But it seemed that, after all, neither had anything especial he wished
to hear; and so, when she had looked through the table of contents
of a magazine or two, Joan found herself, in spite of the original
urgency of her mission, sitting back and idly talking. Doubtless a
fair explanation of this was that she had discovered that he, as a
cross-section of real life, was more interesting to her than any
fiction, which at best is merely a reflection of reality. As for
him, his experience with at least a dozen heroines during the past
week proved positively that the most brilliant of the authors were
stupid and clumsy when the work of their pens was put in such close
juxtaposition with actuality as in the present case. Even a poet cannot
describe black hair like hers as well as a man can see it—or eyes or
nose or mouth. Then there were a thousand other details, and these
other details were changing from second to second—changing so subtly
that words were powerless to trace the shadings. Sometimes they were
scarcely visible, but were rather variations of moods as intangible as
his own moods. Superficially, for example, her eyes remained always
the same in color and size, and yet they were never the same a minute
at a time. Even she as a whole did not remain fixed, because, as with
each visit he came to know her better and came to realize how much more
there was to know, she developed like a portrait on canvas under the
hands of an artist.
His attitude toward her at first had been one of challenge. He had
expected a certain class feeling to make itself manifest in her. He was
ready to resent any superiority she might express, even unconsciously,
as a result of her social position and wealth. He was for a little
while the elder Devons with all the latter’s pride in his few acres and
liberty. But as he found nothing to pit his aggressiveness against he
began to realize that after all it was he if any one who was playing
the cad. She was more natural and genuine than he. In not accepting her
for just what she was, he was unfair.
He was especially conscious of that to-day. And so he allowed himself
to unfold to her something of his past. It was at her prompting.
“I envy you and Mildred the chance you’ve had to travel and see
things,” she observed.
“Haven’t you traveled?” he asked.
“Only a little, abroad,” she answered.
To him that was the only kind of real traveling there was. The few back
home who had been to London or Paris were looked upon with something
like reverence.
“Then you’ve seen more than I,” he declared.
“Of buildings and pictures, perhaps. But always I took my own little
world with me.”
“You were lucky to have it.”
“You think so?”
He smiled.
“All this,” he went on, with a wave of his hand about the room,
“means—I wonder if you realize how much it means?”
“I wonder if you realize how little it means?” she ventured back.
He glanced up in surprise. Then he smiled again.
“I suppose facts, from a distance, get toned down,” he went on. “But
when you have to live them they stay pretty much as they are. You’ve
never been out West?”
“No,” she answered.
“It’s a wonderful country—to some,” he said. “To others—my father was
born out there. He grew up and married out there. He has worked like a
galley slave out there—all within ten miles of where he was born.”
“Tell me about him,” she begged.
“That’s about all there is to tell of him,” said Devons grimly. “I
suppose he had some ambition at first, but he stayed where he was. He
married early, and had ten children before he was forty. Then he _had_
to stay. He just plugged along day after day without energy enough
left to look ahead to the next day. Most of his life it’s just been a
question of getting enough to eat for himself and the others.”
Her eyes were sympathetic.
“He was honest and decent and worked hard. It doesn’t seem fair, does
it?”
“No.”
“I don’t know how I happened to wake up. I guess it was the teacher I
had when I went to the district school. She urged me on to the high
school, though that meant leaving home. And there I did so well in
chemistry that a teacher from the East suggested Technology. I didn’t
think I could make it at first—but I did. I got my degree. Then—well,
here I am.”
He stopped abruptly.
“What about between Technology and—here?” she asked.
“That’s the story of a dream that didn’t come true,” he answered.
“You’ll tell me about it some day?”
“I think you’d find the stories in the magazine pleasanter,” he
returned. “In those the dreams all come true.”
“Perhaps that’s because they go through to the end.”
He was thoughtful a moment, and then he nodded, his lips firm.
“Yes,” he said. “There’s that difference.”
“Why, you—you’ve just begun!”