"Oh!" said the girl. "What is it about?"
He yielded to the temptation with a weakness which he found incredible in
a person of his make. "I can repeat it if you won't give me away to Mrs.
March."
"Oh, no indeed!" He said the lines over to her very simply and well."
They are beautiful--beautiful!"
"Do you think so?" he gasped, in his joy at her praise.
"Yes, lovely. Do you know, you are the first literary man--the only
literary man--I ever talked with. They must go out--somewhere! Papa must
meet them at his clubs. But I never do; and so I'm making the most of
you."
"You can't make too much of me, Miss Triscoe," said Burnamy.
She would not mind his mocking. "That day you spoke about 'The Maiden
Knight', don't you know, I had never heard any talk about books in that
way. I didn't know you were an author then."
"Well, I'm not much of an author now," he said, cynically, to retrieve
his folly in repeating his poem to her.
"Oh, that will do for you to say. But I know what Mrs. March thinks."
He wished very much to know what Mrs. March thought, too; 'Every Other
Week' was such a very good place that he could not conscientiously
neglect any means of having his work favorably considered there; if Mrs.
March's interest in it would act upon her husband, ought not he to know
just how much she thought of him as a writer? "Did she like the poem."
Miss Triscoe could not recall that Mrs. March had said anything about the
poem, but she launched herself upon the general current of Mrs. March's
liking for Burnamy. "But it wouldn't do to tell you all she said!" This
was not what he hoped, but he was richly content when she returned to his
personal history. "And you didn't know any one when, you went up to
Chicago from--"
"Tippecanoe? Not exactly that. I wasn't acquainted with any one in the
office, but they had printed somethings of mine, and they were willing to
let me try my hand. That was all I could ask."
"Of course! You knew you could do the rest. Well, it is like a romance. A
woman couldn't have such an adventure as that!" sighed the girl.
"But women do!" Burnamy retorted. "There is a girl writing on the paper
now--she's going to do the literary notices while I'm gone--who came to
Chicago from Ann Arbor, with no more chance than I had, and who's made
her way single-handed from interviewing up."
"Oh," said Miss Triscoe, with a distinct drop in her enthusiasm. "Is she
nice?"
"She's mighty clever, and she's nice enough, too, though the kind of
journalism that women do isn't the most dignified. And she's one of the
best girls I know, with lots of sense."
"It must be very interesting," said Miss Triscoe, with little interest in
the way she said it. "I suppose you're quite a little community by
yourselves."
"On the paper?"
"Yes."
"Well, some of us know one another, in the office, but most of us don't.
There's quite a regiment of people on a big paper. If you'd like to come
out," Burnamy ventured, "perhaps you could get the Woman's Page to do."
"What's that?"
"Oh, fashion; and personal gossip about society leaders; and recipes for
dishes and diseases; and correspondence on points of etiquette."
He expected her to shudder at the notion, but she merely asked, "Do women
write it?"
He laughed reminiscently. "Well, not always. We had one man who used to
do it beautifully--when he was sober. The department hasn't had any
permanent head since."
He was sorry he had said this, but it did not seem to shock her, and no
doubt she had not taken it in fully. She abruptly left the subject. "Do
you know what time we really get in to-morrow?"
"About one, I believe--there's a consensus of stewards to that effect,
anyway." After a pause he asked, "Are you likely to be in Carlsbad?"
"We are going to Dresden, first, I believe. Then we may go on down to
Vienna. But nothing is settled, yet."
"Are you going direct to Dresden?"
"I don't know. We may stay in Hamburg a day or two."
"I've got to go straight to Carlsbad. There's a sleeping-car that will
get me there by morning: Mr. Stoller likes zeal. But I hope you'll let me
be of use to you any way I can, before we part tomorrow."
"You're very kind. You've been very good already--to papa." He protested
that he had not been at all good. "But he's used to taking care of
himself on the other side. Oh, it's this side, now!"
"So it is! How strange that seems! It's actually Europe. But as long as
we're at sea, we can't realize it. Don't you hate to have experiences
slip through your fingers?"
"I don't know. A girl doesn't have many experiences of her own; they're
always other people's."
This affected Burnamy as so profound that he did not question its truth.
He only suggested, "Well; sometimes they make other people have the
experiences."
Whether Miss Triscoe decided that this was too intimate or not she left
the question. "Do you understand German?"
"A little. I studied it at college, and I've cultivated a sort of
beer-garden German in Chicago. I can ask for things."
"I can't, except in French, and that's worse than English, in Germany, I
hear."
"Then you must let me be your interpreter up to the last moment. Will
you?"
She did not answer. "It must be rather late, isn't it?" she asked. He let
her see his watch, and she said, "Yes, it's very late," and led the way
within. "I must look after my packing; papa's always so prompt, and I
must justify myself for making him let me give up my maid when we left
home; we expect to get one in Dresden. Good-night!"
Burnamy looked after her drifting down their corridor, and wondered
whether it would have been a fit return for her expression of a sense of
novelty in him as a literary man if he had told her that she was the
first young lady he had known who had a maid. The fact awed him; Miss
Triscoe herself did not awe him so much.