“Why, of course, James,” she made answer in gentle wonder. “I thought you knew that.”
Regardless of the distant nurses, regardless of possible onlookers from the scattered wayside houses, Dad stopped stock-still, gathered her into his arms, then stooped and kissed her.
She raised her lips to his and smiled tenderly up at him.
Then of a sudden she drew back in ostentatious haste.
“There!” she declared vehemently. “It’s true there’s no fool like an old fool. Here I am, a woman with a married daughter, making a spectacle of myself in a public street. Shame on me! And shame on you, too, Jim Brinton!”
“I never dreamed,” said Dad, “that shame could be such a nice thing. But you’re wrong about one thing, dearie. About our being old. For a lot of years I’ve been looking on myself as an old man. And now I know I’m not. I’m just a man. And as for you, Emily—why, I don’t believe you’d know how to be old if you lived to be a million.”
She laughed gayly, in dainty, old-world coquetry.
“I guess you’ve had plenty of practise in making cute speeches like that, James,” she said, “You do it awful easy.”
A momentary vision of nausea came to him of the barren stretch of years at Ideala, when he had believed that all good women shunned him as a drunkard; of his pitiful efforts to make friends with his son’s wife; his avoidance of her social-climber women friends.
“No,” he said shortly. “I’ve had no practise, dear. None.”