United States -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction
He pulled his chair closer to her table then and gave her a lesson in
the making of copy. Edna Willard was never one-half so attractive as
when absorbed in a thing which someone was showing her how to do. Her
hazel eyes would widen and glisten with the joy of comprehending; her
cheeks would flush a deeper pink with the coming of new light, her mouth
would part in a child-like way it had forgotten to outgrow, her head
would nod gleefully in token that she understood, and she had a way
of pulling at her wavy hair and making it more wavy than it had been
before. The man at the next table was a long time in explaining the
making of a dictionary. He spoke in low tones, often looking at the
figure of the man in the skull cap, who was sitting with his back to
them, looking over copy. Once she cried, excitedly: “Oh--I _see_!” and
he warned, “S--h!” explaining, “Let him think you got it all from him.
It will give you a better stand-in.” She nodded, appreciatively, and
felt very well acquainted with this kind man whose voice made her think
of something--called to something--she did not just know what.
After that she became so absorbed in lexicography that when the men
began putting away their things it was hard to realise that the morning
had gone. It was a new and difficult game, the evasion of the copyright
furnishing the stimulus of a hazard.
The man at the next table had been watching her with an amused
admiration. Her child-like absorption, the way every emotion from
perplexity to satisfaction expressed itself in the poise of her head and
the pucker of her face, took him back over years emotionally barren to
the time when he too had those easily stirred enthusiasms of youth. For
the man at the next table was far from young now. His mouth had never
quite parted with boyishness, but there was more white than black in his
hair, and the lines about his mouth told that time, as well as forces
more aging than time, had laid heavy hand upon him. But when he looked
at the girl and told her with a smile that it was time to stop work,
it was a smile and a voice to defy the most tell-tale face in all the
world.
During her luncheon, as she watched the strange people coming and going,
she did much wondering. She wondered why it was that so many of the men
at the dictionary place were very old men; she wondered if it would be a
good dictionary--one that would be used in the schools; she wondered if
Dr. Bunting had made a great deal of money, and most of all she wondered
about the man at the next table whose voice was like--like a dream which
she did not know that she had dreamed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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