Bob Berkley, too, had developed amazingly. He no longer said “Sir” to
Hale--that was bad form at Harvard--he called him by his first name and
looked him in the eye as man to man: just as June--Hale observed--no
longer seemed in any awe of Miss Anne Saunders and to have lost all
jealousy of her, or of anybody else--so swiftly had her instinct taught
her she now had nothing to fear. And Bob and June seemed mightily
pleased with each other, and sometimes Hale, watching them as they
galloped past him on horseback laughing and bantering, felt foolish
to think of their perfect fitness--the one for the other--and the
incongruity of himself in a relationship that would so naturally be
theirs. At one thing he wondered: she had made an extraordinary
record at school and it seemed to him that it was partly through the
consciousness that her brain would take care of itself that she could
pay such heed to what hitherto she had had no chance to learn--dress,
manners, deportment and speech. Indeed, it was curious that she seemed
to lay most stress on the very things to which he, because of his long
rough life in the mountains, was growing more and more indifferent.
It was quite plain that Bob, with his extreme gallantry of manner,
his smart clothes, his high ways and his unconquerable gayety, had
supplanted him on the pedestal where he had been the year before, just
as somebody, somewhere--his sister, perhaps--had supplanted Miss Anne.
Several times indeed June had corrected Hale's slips of tongue with
mischievous triumph, and once when he came back late from a long trip in
the mountains and walked in to dinner without changing his clothes,
Hale saw her look from himself to the immaculate Bob with an unconscious
comparison that half amused, half worried him. The truth was he was
building a lovely Frankenstein and from wondering what he was going to
do with it, he was beginning to wonder now what it might some day
do with him. And though he sometimes joked with Miss Anne, who had
withdrawn now to the level plane of friendship with him, about the
transformation that was going on, he worried in a way that did neither
his heart nor his brain good. Still he fought both to little purpose
all that summer, and it was not till the time was nigh when June must
go away again, that he spoke both. For Hale's sister was going to marry,
and it was her advice that he should take June to New York if only for
the sake of her music and her voice. That very day June had for the
first time seen her cousin Dave. He was on horseback, he had been
drinking and he pulled in and, without an answer to her greeting, stared
her over from head to foot. Colouring angrily, she started on and then
he spoke thickly and with a sneer:
“'Bout fryin' size, now, ain't ye? I reckon maybe, if you keep on,
you'll be good enough fer him in a year or two more.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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