It was the fourth or fifth time Tom and Maisie had come to this retreat, nominally that Tom should learn to dance, but really that they should commune together. To him the occasions were blissful for the reason that he had no one else in the world to commune with. To talk, to talk eagerly, to pour out the torrent of opinions boiling within him, meant more than that Maisie should understand him. Maisie didn't understand him. She only laughed and joked with pretty inanity; but she let him talk. He talked about the books he liked and didn't like, about the advantages college men possessed over those who weren't college men, about what he knew of the banking system, about the good you conferred on the world and yourself when you saved your money and invested it. In none of these subjects was she interested; but now and then she could get a turn to talk of the movies, the new dances, and love. That these subjects made him uneasy was not, from Maisie's point of view, a reason for avoiding them.
Each was concerned with the other, but beyond the other each was concerned most of all with the mystery called Life. To live was what they were after, to live strongly and deeply and vividly and hotly, and to do it with the pinched means and narrow opportunities which were all they could command. In his secret heart Tom Whitelaw knew that Maisie Danker was not the girl out of all the world he would have sought of his own accord, while Maisie Danker was equally aware that this boy two years younger than herself couldn't be the generous provider she was looking for. They were only like shipwrecked passengers thrown together on an island. They must make the best of each other. No other girl, hardly any other human being except Honey, had entered the social isolation in which he was marooned, and as for her....
She was so cheery and game that she never referred to her home experiences otherwise than allusively. From allusions he gathered that she was not with her aunt, Mrs. Danker, merely for pleasure or from pressure of affection. Her father was living; her stepmother was living too. There was a whole step-family of little brothers and sisters. Her father drank; her stepmother hated her; there was no room for her at home. All her life she had been knocked about. Even when she worked in the woolen mills she couldn't keep her wages. She had had fellows, but none of them was ever any good. The best of them was a French Canadian who made big money, but he wouldn't marry her unless she "turned Catholic." "If he couldn't give up his church for me I couldn't give up mine for him; so there it was!" There was another fellow.... But as to him she said little. In speaking of him at all her face grew somber, which it did rarely. Either because he had failed her, or to get her out of his clutches, Tom was not sure which, her aunt had offered her a home for the winter. "Gee, it makes me laff," was her own sole comment on her miseries.
As Tom had dropped into the habit of telling her the small happenings of his uneventful life, he gave her, across the ice-cream sodas, an account of what had just occurred between himself and Guy and Hildred Ansley.
She listened with what for her was gravity. "You've got to give some of them society girls the cold glassy eye," she informed him, judicially. "If you don't you'll get it yourself, perhaps when you ain't expecting it."
"Oh, but this is only a little girl, not more than fourteen. She just seems grown up. That's the funny part of it."
"Not more than fourteen! Just seems grown up! Why, any of that bunch is forwarder at ten than I'd be at twenty. That's one thing I'd never be, not if men was scarcer than blue raspberries—forward. And yet some of them society buds'll be brassier than a knocker on a door."
"Oh, but this little Miss Ansley isn't that sort."
"You wouldn't know, not if she was running up and down your throat. Any girl can get hold of a man if she makes him think she needs him bad enough."
"It wasn't she who needed me; it was her brother."