“I beg a thousand pardons!” he said. “It was all my fault and it was certainly very stupid of me.”
“It’s of no importance. Where must I go to reserve space on the night train?” said Miss Greene.
Vernon told her, and proffered his services. He was now delighted at the philosophical way in which she accepted the situation—it would have brought the average woman, he reflected, to tears—and then he went on to picture to himself the practical results in improving women’s characters that his new measure, as he had already come to regard it, would bring about.
VII
MARIA GREENE would not let Vernon attend to her tickets; she said it was a matter of principle with her; but late in the afternoon, when they had had luncheon, and she had got the tickets herself, she did accept his invitation to drive. The afternoon had justified all the morning’s promise of a fine spring day, and as they left the edges of the town and turned into the road that stretched away over the low undulations of ground they call hills in Illinois, and lost itself mysteriously in the country far beyond, Miss Greene became enthusiastic.
“Isn’t it glorious!” she cried. “And to think that when I left Chicago last night it was still winter!” She shuddered, as if she would shake off the memory of the city’s ugliness. Her face was flushed and she inhaled the sweet air eagerly.
“To be in the country once more!” she went on.
“Did you ever live in the country?” Vernon asked.
“Once,” she said, and then after a grave pause she added: “A long time ago.”
The road they had turned into was as soft and as smooth as velvet now that the spring had released it from the thrall of winter’s mud. It led beside a golf links, and the new greens were already dotted with golfers, who played with the zest they had accumulated in the forbidding winter months. They showed their enthusiasm by playing bare-armed, as if already it were the height of summer.