"Oh, come now. Hardly," Rod protested.
"No? You don't know anything about people outside of your own comfortable, spoon-fed class, Rod. That's the trouble. I do. I know my own kind of people first-hand. Three years in the U.B.C. has taught me something about your kind. I've been an outsider—looking in. Money, clothes and manners. Manners are an asset; money is a necessity. If you've got both you can go anywhere, do anything. If you haven't, there's the deadline, and you can't cross. Pretty much everything that a university training fits one for, especially a girl, is across that deadline. It's rather depressing—sometimes."
Rod was dumb for the moment,—because he was not stupid, and he knew what she said was true. He had seen the working out of those unpleasant truths during his own university career. He knew youngsters at McGill sweating and scraping through—boys with steel-bright minds, struggling against the fearful handicap of poverty. He had an inkling now of what old Mark Sherburne meant when he ironically retorted to some one across a dinner table that he didn't need brains—he could buy 'em by the gross. Rod hated the idea of Mary Thorn being embraced in such a category. He reviewed in one panoramic flash her situation and his own. He compared her with girls he knew. Isabel Wall, for instance. Less mind—oh, much less. Isabel was a doll-like creature still. An impractical, useless young woman, even if highly ornamental. Clothes, dances, parties, sports, and men about comprised Isabel's desire of and knowledge of life. Yet she had everything money could buy. She had the entrée everywhere.
Mary had neither money nor more than a glancing acquaintance with those who had. He recalled with a touch of shame that although they had played together from childhood, despite the fact that they had lived within sight of each other for ten years, Mary had never set foot within Hawk's Nest. And he had a swift, disconcerting vision of how difficult it would be for her to get a foothold in the Norquay circle,—or its equivalent.
It wasn't right. It wasn't fair. There was something rotten in such an arrangement. In so far as this clear-eyed girl sitting beside him was concerned, Rod felt that he must do something about it. Why, he didn't pause to consider. He simply felt the compulsion to act, as he would have been impelled to act if some unfairness had been practiced toward himself.
They dropped that subject as if it were a live coal, as if they had both become suddenly wary of self-revelation. And as they continued to speak casually of other things, Rod mentally registered the fact that by some occult process they two, from their divergent poles, seemed to converge always. Six months, a year, two years: the separation in lapsed time didn't seem to matter. When they met again they did not so much begin where they left off, as at once find themselves on common ground, breathing a natural air of intimacy. Girls in Rod's experience were either provocative, kittenish, silly, or rare, lofty-minded creatures whose worship at the shrine of pure intellect was almost an affectation. He had been in the last four years so often between the devil of jazzy damozels and the deep sea of the female highbrow, alternating between amusement and impatience. Mary Thorn came nearest to qualifying as a chum, with the added factor of an elusive personal charm.
They were sitting on the calk-punctured board steps of Oliver Thorn's house. For a minute or two Mary's gaze turned on the slope that ran up to the Granite Pool. Whenever Rod tried to analyze his liking for her, he stressed that quality of self-containedness. She could think her own thoughts as if he were not there. She was thinking them now. He wondered what they were. He had a retentive memory; he was tenacious of impressions. Looking at her, he wondered if she were thinking of the day they sat on the log watching the rapids boil in their pent channel; if she were thinking of that unpremeditated kiss. Recalling it, Rod felt his heart quicken. And, as if some invisible thread linked their minds for an instant, Mary's eyes turned to his with a reminiscent gleam. A faint flush tinted her cheeks. She looked away.
Rod covered her hand with his. She let it lie passive. The touch warmed his blood, filled him with a quick glow. For a moment all the world was shut away, all but himself and her and the hot sunlight on the shining channel water.
He shook off that swift rush of emotion, startled, astonished, a little dismayed. He sat testing the strength of his resolution, wondering at the thing that stirred him so deeply, trying to grasp its substance. Her hand was warm and soft. Faint tremors shook it slightly.
"What a damned shame things are so badly arranged," he said. "Let's fix 'em to suit ourselves, Mary."