"I shouldn't be surprised if it were quite true," she said indifferently. "Some people do what they like. Others have to toe the line. It's a queer, queer world, Rod."
He left about two-thirty. Striding up Robson Street to Mary's boarding place, he shook off a half-formed impression that Laska was bored and discontented, that she found the only world she knew a rather hollow affair. There was a vague fretfulness about her. It was just an impression. And it was not his concern. Mary Thorn was decidedly his concern, for that afternoon at least. Laska, Grove, the Norquay Trust vanished out of his mind at sight of Mary Thorn.
For, as he walked beside her along a street which led to the sandy foreshore and green reaches of Stanley Park, Rod found himself stirred by a strange procession of fancies. They trooped through his mind, quickened his blood. What was there about a girl (a pretty girl, but of no great beauty compared to other girls he knew) in a white organdie dress, with a rather immobile face shadowed under the floppy brim of a leghorn hat, to stir him so, to make him desire nearness to her and to find that nearness disturbing? Rod's brain registered flashes of himself holding her close, of her face smiling into his,—unwelcome visions like that while his lips uttered sentences about Montreal, continental Europe, books, plays he had seen, such pronunciamento generally as the conversation required of a second-year university man who had been abroad.
"I wonder if this is the way a man starts in getting foolish over some particular girl?" Rod thought to himself, "Or am I just like Grove and some fellows I know?"
This while he told her of a quaint old place in Scotland, where he had visited a branch of distant kin, the summer before.
Mary listened, talked in her normal quiet way, turning to him occasionally with a smile that fluttered briefly across her face and made her eyes light up.
There was no provocative suggestion about her. It was nothing she did or said that stirred and puzzled Rod. It was merely herself, her presence, a pleasant-faced girl with a low, throaty note in her voice and a slender well-formed body which had a peculiar grace of movement. Magnetic? That overworked term to define the indefinable. What was there about her to stir a man so? Rod asked himself that after he had said good-by to her at five o'clock.
And there flitted across his consciousness a faint, troublesome perception of dynamic forces in human relations of which a man must acquire knowledge empirically, concerning which all the textbooks are silent.
Rod spent the months of July and August very much as he had spent all the Julys and Augusts of earlier years. That is to say, he paddled a canoe, swam, sailed, fished trout and salmon, made himself agreeable to sundry guests, male and female. About Hawk's Nest no material change appeared, however Rod might vainly wrinkle his brows over a subtle transformation which he could not analyze, but which he felt as a blind man feels the nearness of some insensate mass. He was free from the tutorial direction. Mr. Spence had definitely retired into a pensioned leisure, having done his full duty by this generation of Norquays. Rod was twenty, his brain and his beard both in training for manhood. He could lounge or play as he elected, come and go as he desired.
Not so long before, measured by seasons, life had seemed to him the simplest sort of affair. One took it perforce as it came. Certain things were ordered, irrevocable; other things a matter of choice; a few, a very few transitory phases of existence, a matter of chance.