"He made me feel as if I were doing something disgraceful."
"Worse. Something not quite nice." Franklin Herrick chuckled. When Herrick laughed his voice was higher and thinner than when he spoke, but when he chuckled there was something warm and young about it. Herrick had discovered this very early in life and rarely laughed aloud. When women first heard Franklin Herrick chuckle they usually had an impulse to touch him, which impulse they called maternal or were afraid of according to their past experience. Jean, however, had no impulse to touch him, but she noticed the chuckle and liked it.
As she took her place at the table and watched Herrick cross the room for a chair, she felt that the set of his shoulders, the texture of his clothes, the very motions of his body as he lifted the chair, were not external, but expressed something within the man, just as the deft motions of Martha's hands expressed her indefatigable obedience to the drudgery of small things. And Jean liked the thing they expressed. Without defining it in words, she felt that it was something indestructibly young and buoyant and clean. It belonged with his eyes and not at all with the rather heavy lines of his chin and throat.
With a smile, Herrick drew forward a pile of books, and in a moment was hard at work. But only the surface of his brain was concerned with his notes. He knew that, from time to time, Jean glanced at him, and that, for some reason, she had changed her first estimate of him. Vibrant to any criticism, Herrick resented the implication that there had been a readjustment, and yet delighted in the result. For Jean looked as if she usually made up her mind instantly from trifles and seldom changed. She looked stronger and spiritually simpler than any woman he had ever met, as if she had been born and raised in wide spaces and carried the standards of the mountains with her. He could not picture her large, white hands ever trembling, nor her clear, gray eyes clouding with indecision, but he was sure that if he let the least hint of this sureness into his eyes, her fair skin would flush.
It was almost five when Herrick slipped the notes into his pocket and pushed back his chair.
"Through?" The brusqueness of Jean's tone annoyed him, for he had decided to stay and talk for a few moments, and the indifference in her question made him feel that Jean had shut a door he was about to push a little open.
"Yes. For the present. But I shall have to put in some licks to-night." He picked up a volume and looked inquiringly at her. "I don't suppose there would be any objection to taking this out, even if it isn't ready for circulation yet?"
"I don't know. It is against the rules."
"Perfectly good reason for taking it then."
"Just let me have it a moment. I'll make out a slip and number it."