His lips were opened to tell her of her own beauty, but something
restrained him, some perception of maidenly dignity that enfolded her
and made her more than the girl who had waited on the table.
"You were a polite little boy," she recalled, filling the breach made by
his silence. "I remember that you carried me across the street, to save
my slippers from the wet. I thought you were wonderful. I have never
forgotten."
Neither had Van Alen forgotten. It had been a great feat for his little
strength. There had been other boys there, bigger boys, but he had
offered, and had been saved humiliation by her girlish slimness and
feather weight.
"I was a strong little fellow then," was his comment: "I am a strong
little fellow now."
She turned on him reproachful eyes. "Why do you always harp on it?" she
demanded.
"On what?"
"Your size. You twist everything, turn everything, so that we come back
to it."
He tried to answer lightly, but his voice shook. "Perhaps it is because
in your presence I desire more than ever the full stature of a man."
He was in deadly earnest. Hitherto he had been willing to match his
brain, his worldly knowledge, his ancestry, against the charms of the
women he had met; but here with this girl, standing like a young goddess
under the wide, sunset sky, he felt that only for strength and beauty
should she choose her mate.
He wondered what he must seem in her eyes; with his shoulder on a level
with hers, with his stocky build that saved him from effeminacy, his
carefulness of attire--which is at once the burden and the salvation of
the small man.
As for his face, he knew that its homeliness was redeemed by a certain
strength of chin, by keen gray eyes, and by a shock of dark hair that
showed a little white at the temples. There were worse-looking men, he
knew, but that, at the present moment, gave little comfort.
She chose to receive his remark in silence, and, as they came to a path
that branched from the road, she said:
"I am going to help take care of a child who is sick. You see I am
mistress of all trades--nurse, waitress, charwoman, when there is
nothing else."
He glanced at her hands. "I cannot believe that you scrub," he said.
"I sit up at night to care for my hands"--there was a note of bitterness
in her tone--"and I wear gloves when I work. There are some things that
one desires to hold on to, and my mother and my grandmother were ladies
of leisure."
"Would you like that--to be a lady of leisure?"
She turned and smiled at him. "How can I tell?" she asked; "I have never
tried it."
She started to leave him as she said it, but he held her with a
question: "Shall you sit up all night?"