“Lord! You look pretty enough to eat!” Clem Carson ejaculated, but he saw then that she was not even aware that he was speaking to her.
In one of the few books allowed for Sunday reading in the orphanage—a beautiful, thick book with color-plate illustrations, its name, “Stories from the Bible,” lettered in glittering gold on a back of heavenly blue—Sally had found and secretly worshiped the portrait of her ideal hero. It was a vividly colored picture of David, forever fixed in strong, beautiful grace, as he was about to hurl the stone from his slingshot to slay the giant, Goliath. She had dreamed away many hours of her adolescence and early young girlhood, the big book open on her knee at the portrait of the Biblical hero, and it had not seemed like sacrilege to adopt that sun-drenched, strong-limbed but slender boy as the personification of her hopes for romance.
And now he was striding toward her—the very David of “Stories from the Bible.” True, the sheepskin raiment of the picture was exchanged for a blue shirt, open at the throat, and for a pair of cheap, earth-soiled “jeans” trousers; but the boy-man was the same, the same! As he strode lightly, with the ease of an athlete or the light-footedness of a god, the sun flamed in his curling, golden-brown hair. He was tall, but not so tall as Clem Carson, and there were power and ease and youth in every motion of his beautiful body.
“Did you get the plowshare sharpened, Mr. Carson? I’ve been waiting for it, but in the meantime I’ve been tinkering with that little hand cider press. We ought to do a good business with it if we set up a cider stand on the state road, at the foot of the lane.”
Joy deepened the sapphire of Sally’s eyes, quivered along the curves of her soft little mouth. For his voice was as she had dreamed it would be—vibrant, clear, strong, with a thrill of music in it.
“Sure I got it sharpened, Dave,” Carson answered curtly. “You oughta get in another good hour with the cultivator before dark. You run along in the back door there, Sally. Mrs. Carson will be needing you to help her with supper.”
The change in Carson’s voice startled her, made her wince. Why was he angry with her—and with David, whose gold-flecked hazel eyes were smiling at her, shyly, as if he were a little ashamed of Carson for not having introduced them? But, oh, his name was David! David! It had had to be David.
In the big kitchen, dominated by an immense coal-and-wood cook stove, Sally found Mrs. Carson busy with supper preparations. Her daughter, Pearl, drifted about the kitchen, coughing at intervals to remind her mother that she was ill.
Pearl Carson, in that first moment after Sally had bumped into her at the door, had seemed to the orphaned girl to be much older than she, for her plump body was voluptuously developed and overdecked with finery. The farmer’s daughter wore her light red hair deeply marcelled. The natural color in her broad, plump cheeks was heightened by rouge, applied lavishly over a heavy coating of white powder.
Her lavender silk crepe dress was made very full and short of skirt, so that her thick-ankled legs were displayed almost to the knee. It was before the day of knee dresses for women and Sally, standing there awkwardly with her own bundle and the parcels which Carson had thrust into her arms, blushed for the extravagant display of unlovely flesh.