The conversation languished again.
Without ever having been aware of it Thompson's circle of friends and acquaintances had been people of wordy inclination. Their thoughts dripped unceasingly from their tongue's end like water from a leaky faucet. He had never come in contact with a type of men who keep silent unless they have something to say, who think more than they speak. The spinster aunts had been voluble persons, full of small chatter, women of no mental reservations whatever. The young men of his group had not been much different. The reflective attitude as opposed to the discursive was new to him. New and embarrassing. He felt impelled to talk, and while he groped uncertainly for some congenial subject he grew more and more acutely self-conscious. He felt that these men were calmly taking his measure. Especially Sam Carr.
He wanted to go on talking. He protested against their intercourse congealing in that fashion. But he could find no opening. His conversational stock-in-trade, he had the sense to realize, was totally unlike theirs. He could do nothing but sit still, remain physically inert while he was mentally in a state of extreme unrest. He ventured a banality about the weather. Carr smiled faintly. Tommy Ashe observed offhand that the heat was beastly, but not a patch to blizzards and frost. Then they were silent again.
Thompson had effected a sort of compromise with his principles when he sought Carr. He had more or less consciously resolved to keep his calling in the background, to suppress the evangelical tendency which his training had made nearly second nature. This for the sake of intelligent companionship. He was like a man sentenced to solitary confinement. Even the temporary presence of a jailer is a boon to such, a break in the ghastly solitude. But he was fast succumbing to a despair of reaching across the barrier of this critical silence and he was about to rise and leave when he happened to look about and see Sophie Carr standing within arm's length, gazing at him with a peculiar intentness, a mild look of surprise upon her vivid young face, a trace of puzzlement.
A most amazing thing happened to Mr. Thompson. His heart leaped.
Perhaps it rarely happens that a normal, healthy man reaches a comparative degree of maturity without experiencing a quickening of his blood in the presence of a woman. Yet it cannot be gainsaid that it does happen. It was so in Thompson's case. Staring into the clear pools of Sophie Carr's gray eyes some strange quality of attraction in a woman first dawned on him. Something that made him feel a passionate sense of incompleteness.
He did not think this. The singular longing had flamed up like a beacon within him. It had nothing to do with his mental processes. It was purely an instinctive revelation. A blind man whose sight has been restored, upon whose eager vision bursts suddenly all the bright beauty of sun and sky and colorful landscape, could have been no more bewildered than he. It was as if indeed he had been blind.
All the women he had ever known seemed pale and colorless beside this girl standing near, her head a little aside as she looked at him. There was not a detail of her that escaped him, that failed to make its appeal, from the perfect oval of her face down to the small feet in bead-ornamented moccasins. A woman's eyes, her hair, her hands, her bearing—these things had never obtruded upon his notice before. Yet he saw now that a shaft of sunlight on her hair made it shimmer like ripe wheat straw, that her breast was full and rounded, her lips red and sweetly curved. But it was not alone that swift revelation of seductive beauty, or warm human desirableness, that stirred him so deeply, that afflicted him with those queer uncomfortable sensations. He found himself struggling with a sense of guilt, of shame. The world, the flesh, and the devil seemed leagued against his peace of mind.
He was filled with an incredulous wonder as to what manner of thing this was which had blown through the inner recesses of his being like a gusty wind through an open door. He had grown to manhood with nothing but a cold, passionless tolerance in his attitude toward women. Technically he was aware of sex, advised as to its pitfalls and temptations; actually he could grasp nothing of the sort. A very small child is incapable of associating pain with a hot iron until the hot iron has burned him. Even then he can scarcely correlate cause and effect. Neither could Thompson. No woman had ever before stirred his pulse to an added beat.
But this—this subtle, mysterious emanation from a smiling girl at his elbow singed him like a flame. If he had been asleep he was now in a moment breathlessly, confusedly awake.