"Then I must go." She jumped to her feet, and faced about for a glimpse
of herself in the little glass on the mantel, and put her hand on the
large pink roses massed at her waist. One heavy bud dropped from its stem
to the floor, where, while she stood, the edge of her skirt pulled and
pushed it. She moved a little aside to peer over at a photograph. Jeff
stooped and picked up the flower, which he offered her.
"You dropped it," he said, bowing over it.
"Did I?" She looked at it with an effect of surprise and doubt.
"I thought so, but if you don't, I shall keep it."
The girl removed her careless eyes from it. "When they break off so
short, they won't go back."
"If I were a rose, I should want to go back," said Jeff.
She stopped in one of her many aversions and reversions, and looked at
him steadily across her shoulder. "You won't have to keep a poet, Mr.
Durgin."
"Thank you. I always expected to write the circulars myself. I'll send
you one."
"Do."
"With this rose pressed between the leaves, so you'll know."
"That would, be very pretty. But you must take me to Mrs. Bevidge, now,
if you can."
"I guess I can," said Jeff; and in a minute or two they stood before the
matronizing hostess, after a passage through the babbling and laughing
groups that looked as impossible after they had made it as it looked
before.
Mrs. Bevidge gave the girl's hand a pressure distinct from the official
touch of parting, and contrived to say, for her hearing alone: "Thank you
so much, Bessie. You've done missionary work."
"I shouldn't call it that."
"It will do for you to say so! He wasn't really so bad, then? Thank you
again, dear!"
Jeff had waited his turn. But now, after the girl had turned away, as if
she had forgotten him, his eyes followed her, and he did not know that
Mrs. Bevidge was speaking to him. Miss Lynde had slimly lost herself in
the mass, till she was only a graceful tilt of hat, before she turned
with a distraught air. When her eyes met Jeff's they lighted up with a
look that comes into the face when one remembers what one has been trying
to think of. She gave him a brilliant smile that seemed to illumine him
from head to foot, and before it was quenched he felt as if she had
kissed her hand to him from her rich mouth.
Then he heard Mrs. Bevidge asking something about a hall, and he was
aware of her bending upon him a look of the daring humanity that had
carried her triumphantly through her good works at the North End.
"Oh, I'm not in the Yard," said Jeff, with belated intelligence.
"Then will just Cambridge reach you?"
He gave his number and street, and she thanked him with the benevolence
that availed so much with the lower classes. He went away thrilling and
tingling, with that girl's tones in his ear, her motions in his nerves,
and the colors of her face filling his sight, which he printed on the air
whenever he turned, as one does with a vivid light after looking at it.