Ann Arbor (Mich.) -- Fiction; Short stories, American
"Was there another--another besides the ogress who turned out to be the
sensible girl? Tell me, Jack; it's all I want to know. I don't know why
I should want to know even that; but I do. I guess a girl always does.
Perhaps it's because it usually tends either to light-up things or to
make her still more miserable. I don't know which; only it's at such
times that a girl wants either light or more misery. One seems to do as
well as the other. Tell me--was there, Jack?"
He met her eyes frankly, as he spoke.
"Why Flo--I--you see----" He looked away.
She settled back among the cushions.
"Flo, you wouldn't understand," he managed to say. "You see, it's----"
"But I know now," she exclaimed--"and somehow it makes me feel
better----"
"Flo!"
She perceived the reproof in his tone and added eagerly: "Don't think I
meant to mock you, dear; I didn't truly. I meant just what I said--and
just that way...."
Presently he stood up before her and looked down into her face.
"Flo,"--he spoke earnestly, almost passionately--"Flo, you're a girl in
a million!"
"There!" she cried gaily, "that's better than '_sensible_.'"
He smiled.
"In a million," he repeated as though to himself. "I can never, never
forget you----"
"Oh, Jack!" Again the old note of playful raillery crept into her voice.
"Now you've gone back. Of course you can't forget me; at least you
mustn't, really you mustn't; it wouldn't be fair."
He took up his hat from the little table.
"Are you going?" she asked.
"I'd better," he said, simply.
"And shan't I see you again?..."
Before he could reply she cried: "But I can see you graduate! I can see
you get the Athens scholarship; and I shall too. And oh, Jack, when I
read some day about you I shall be so glad--so glad I'll cry!" As she
spoke he saw the thin mist that he remembered seeing once before, gather
over her eyes again. He touched her lightly on the cheeks with the tips
of his fingers, and, stooping kissed her forehead.
"Good-bye," he said.
She took his hand and pressed it.
"Good-bye--and the best luck in the world!" she cried.
She heard the door close behind him. For a long time she did not move
from among the cushions. Finally she rose. From the top shelf of the
teak wood bookcase she took down a Japanese rose jar, and from it drew
out a little card portrait of a young sweet-faced girl. She stood at the
window and lifting her eyes from the portrait gazed off down the
street.... The pink faded from her cheeks.... The photograph slipped
from her fingers.... She sank upon her knees and hid her face among the
cushions.... By and by she rose and went out into the hallway and up the
stairs....
Her mother, entering below, called to her.
"I'm up here dressing, dear," she answered. "I had a note from Ed
Trombley--you remember him, mother--a '90 man. His class is having a
reunion and he's back for it. He has asked me to drive to the Lake with
him--you don't care do you?"
"No child...."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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