Husband and wife -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Jimmie's jaw dropped and he sat staring at her in stupid amazement.
He could see the delicate lines of her figure drawn tense and sharp
like the body of some very beautiful animal straining before a leap.
He could see that her whole mind and heart were being thrown into the
words that she was driving down upon the paper, and it was not merely
his loyalty, his faith in everything that Augusta did, which told
him that what she was doing was fine. He knew that she was creating
something worthy, by the very power that he saw straining in her
effort. She was putting will and soul and a wonderful, untrammelled
native intelligence into it, and it could be nothing less than good.
He waited excitedly for the end of the page, to see what she would
do. Augusta was orderly above all other things. Jimmie was making
hasty bets with himself as to whether her little god of order would
prevail and make her take the paper out carefully and look at it before
starting another, as a sane person would do, or would she throw it down
and race on with another without looking at what she had done. If she
did the latter, then the fever had indeed taken her and she was lost.
He gave a mental whoop of sympathy as Augusta, coming with a bang
to the end of the sheet, fairly tore it from the machine and threw
it down without looking to see whether it fell on the table or the
floor. With the same motion of her swift hands she had swept down upon
another sheet of paper and without even waiting to straighten it had
jammed it into the machine and was banging away for dear life upon the
over-lapping sentence.
"Another good cook and honest citizen lost!" Jimmie groaned to himself.
"Once that fever has bitten her she won't care which side the fish
is burned on." Nevertheless, with the eagerness and adroitness of a
thieving cat, he stole across the floor and picked up the paper from
where it had fallen, without disturbing Augusta.
He read the page that Augusta had written, without comment of any kind.
Then with a sort of stupid solemnity he gathered up the pages at which
he himself had been scribbling and examined them gravely, as though his
reading of Augusta's page had put them in an entirely new light. He
laid down his own work on his knees and beside it he laid the page that
Augusta had written, and read wonderingly from one and from the other.
In his own work he had gone back to the point where he had left the
story months ago. He had not used a single one of the ideas which
he had so laboriously dictated to Augusta, but had struck into an
entirely new turn. Augusta could not have known what he was doing or
thinking today. Yet she had taken his idea just where he had left it
and she was carrying it through the very drift which he had just today
thought of.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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