How was Jim to know this was an event in Marie Ducharme’s life? How was he to know it was her first social invitation from a man whom she cared to have as a companion, who was fitted by intelligence, by ideals, to be her companion? How was he to know that she had never driven with a young man as other country girls drive with neighboring boys? She was excited. Something welled up inside her that made breathing difficult, but that was delightful. Jim, too, was young. His experience had not taught him how hard is the problem of the girl in the village—how marriage looms before her as the sole end to be desired, and how difficult is a suitable marriage to attain. He did not know how many girls with brains, with ideals, with ambitions, have, to escape spinsterhood and its dreariness, allowed themselves to be married to bumpkins, whose sole recommendation was their ability to provide support. Nor did he know how many such girls wore out their souls and their hearts in bitterness through lengthening years. Such a fate Marie Ducharme was determined to escape. CHAPTER XV Jim and Marie Ducharme took the north road out of Diversity. There were eyes that saw them and tongues that wagged when they were gone. Many supper-tables were supplied with a topic of conversation that had been barren without. “Some day,” said Jim, “I’m going to have a farm, and raise red pigs and black cows and white chickens.” “Horrors!” exclaimed Marie; but there was just a note of playfulness in her voice, the first Jim ever had heard there. “Some day I’m going to have an apartment in a hotel, where there’s a Hungarian orchestra at dinner, and servants to answer pushbuttons, and taxicabs in front that take you to theaters. And I’m going to raise—well, not pigs and cows and chickens.” “I shall come in off my farm twice a year to eat with you while the orchestra plays and the pushbuttons buzz and the taxicabs click off exorbitant miles on their meters as we go to those theaters. Pigs and cows and chickens wear, they’re durable company; the other thing is too heady for me. Like champagne once in a while. But one prefers water as a steady diet.” “I’ve only read about champagne,” she said, the sullen mask dropping across her face for an instant. “I’m going to have my farm near the lake,” he said, “so I can lie with my back against a tree and watch it. It is a hundred different lakes every day, and I’d like to get acquainted with all of them.” “And I’d like to be aboard the most palatial steamer that floats, and ride past you, on my way to great cities.” “I’d be happiest,” he said. “I’d be—most excited,” she replied. “The most pitifully bored faces in the world are to be seen in Broadway cafes after midnight.” “But don’t you like to be where things are flashing? Where life is moving so fast you can hardly follow it? Doesn’t it spell happiness for you to be where a new thrill is always at hand for the asking?”