City and town life -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
“The girls that go to garden-parties at Temple Barholm look like those
in the `Ladies' Pictorial', and they've got names and titles same as
those in novels.”
He answered her in genuine anguish. He had never made any mistake about
her character, and she was beginning to make him feel afraid of her in
the midst of his adoration.
“What do I want with a girl out of a magazine?” he cried. “Where should
I hang her up?”
She was not unfeeling, but unshaken and she went on:
“I should look like a housemaid among them. How would you feel with a
wife of that sort, when the other sort was about?”
“I should feel like a king, that's what I should feel like,” he replied
indignantly.
“I shouldn't feel like a queen. I should feel MISERABLE.”
She sat with her little feet dangling, and her hands folded in her lap.
Her infantile blue eyes held him as the Ancient Mariner had been held.
He could not get away from the clear directness of them. He did not want
to exactly, but she frightened him more and more.
“I should be ashamed,” she proceeded. “I should feel as if I had taken
an advantage. What you've got to do is to find out something no one else
can find out for you, Mr. Temple Barholm.”
“How can I find it out without you? It was you who put me on to the
wedding-cake; you can put me on to other things.”
“Because I've lived in the place,” she answered unswervingly. “I know
how funny it is for any one to think of me being Mrs. Temple Barholm.
You don't.”
“You bet I don't,” he answered; “but I'll tell you what I do know, and
that's how funny it is that I should be Mr. Temple Barholm. I've got on
to that all right, all right. Have you?”
She looked at him with a reflection that said much. She took him in with
a judicial summing up of which it must be owned an added respect was
part. She had always believed he had more sense than most young men, and
now she knew it.
“When a person's clever enough to see things for himself, he's generally
clever enough to manage them,” she replied.
He knelt down beside the trunk and took both her hands in his. He held
them fast and rather hard.
“Are you throwing me down for good, Little Ann?” he said. “If you are, I
can't stand it, I won't stand it.”
“If you care about me like that, you'll do what I tell you,” she
interrupted, and she slipped down from the top of her trunk. “I know
what Mother would say. She'd say, 'Ann, you give that young man a
chance.' And I'm going to give you one. I've said all I'm going to, Mr.
Temple Barholm.”
He took both her elbows and looked at her closely, feeling a somewhat
awed conviction.
“I--believe--you have,” he said.
And here the sound of Mr. Hutchinson's loud and stertorous breathing
ceased, and he waked up, and came to the door to find out what Ann was
doing.
“What are you two talking about?” he asked. “People think when they
whisper it's not going to disturb anybody, but it's worse than shouting
in a man's ear.”
Tembarom walked into the room.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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