It occurred to Donald, not for the first time, that he was being rushed
about a great deal here lately, with never a minute he could call his
own. Managed around all the time--that was about the size of it, here
lately: railroaded along into things, with no chance at all to stop and
think quietly what he wanted to do.... Then, in a quiet stretch before
the turn at Ninth Street, he looked down at the beguiling soft creature
beside him, whom he had come to know so easily, so quickly, and so well.
His gaze rested upon the rounded girlish bosom, rising and falling with
tender young life, at the neck fair as a lily where the V of the thin
white waist liberally revealed it, at the big eyes of a woman looking
back at him so dark and sweet. And he was surprised at the sensations
the look of these eyes now had power to draw up out of him. How? Why?
Had absence made the heart mysteriously fonder? Or was it something in
the intimacy of this swift adventure together--her sharing his dash for
the train like some one who belonged to him?...
"I wish I didn't have to run off this way," he muttered, restively,
after a long silence.
"I'll miss you," said she, and the dark eyes fell.
He found the simple reply oddly stirring, arresting, and significant. He
was going to be away only three days, and she, this dear, different
fellow-being whose gentle weakness already seemed to depend on him, was
going to miss him. At some risk, for they now bounced through the
traffic of Center Street, he looked down at her again. And once again
the sum of all Donald's observations was this, that Angela was a
Woman....
No jawing here about the isms of the day, Browning--Tosti--no,
Tolstoy--those chaps; no arguing back at you over things a man, of
course, knows most about. No; this girl was all Woman....
"I suppose," said she, all at once, "there isn't a train just a little
later you could take?"
By singular chance, the thought of the later train had that second
knocked at Donald's own mind. Marveling at the coincidence, he
hesitated, and answered weakly:--
"Well, there's sort of a train at 7.50--a local. But--this is the train
they're expecting me by."
She made no reply. Glancing down, he got no answering glance: she was
looking, large-eyed and wistful, into empty space. Her silence, that
look, seemed in some subtle way to lay hold on whatever was best in the
young man, compellingly. Beyond his understanding, they seemed to
envelop Donald with a sudden profound pressure, immensely detaining.
Now, over lower roofs, the station clock-tower, two blocks away, shot
suddenly up into the fading sky before them. They saw together that it
was twenty minutes past five.
"Oh, hurry!... You've caught it, haven't you?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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