“I can sympathize with you there,” said Vernon, though Miss Greene had not admitted the need of sympathy. Perhaps it was Vernon’s own need of sympathy, or his feeling of the need of it, that made him confess that his own family and friends had never sympathized with him, especially with what he called his work in politics; he felt, at any rate, that he had struck the right note at last, and he went on to assure her how unusual it was to meet a woman who understood public questions as well as she understood them. And it may have been his curiosity that led him to inquire:
“How did your people feel about your taking up the law?”
Miss Greene said that she did not know how her people felt, and Vernon again had that baffled sense of her evading him.
“I’ve felt pretty much alone in my work,” he said. “The women I know won’t talk with me about it; they won’t even read the newspapers. And I’ve tried so hard to interest them in it!”
Vernon sighed, and he waited for Miss Greene to sigh with him. He did not look at her, but he could feel her presence there close beside him. Her gloved hands lay quietly in her lap; she was gazing out over the prairies. The light winds were faintly stirring her hair, and the beauty of it, its warm red tones brought out by the burnishing sun, suddenly overwhelmed him. He stirred and his breath came hard.
“Do you know,” he said, in a new confidence, “that this has been a great day for me? To meet you, and to know you as I think I do know you now! This morning, when I was speaking, I felt that with you to help me, I could do great things.”
Miss Greene drew in her lips, as if to compress their fullness; she moved away on the seat, and raised her hand uneasily and thrust it under her veil to put back a tress of hair that had strayed from its fastening. Vernon saw the flush of her white cheeks come and go. Her eyebrows were drawn together wistfully, and in her blue eyes, that looked far away through the meshes of her dotted veil, there was a little cloud of trouble. She caught her lip delicately between the edges of her teeth. Vernon leaned slightly forward as if he would peer into her face. For him the day had grown suddenly hot, the spring had developed on the instant the oppressive heat of summer. He felt its fire; he could see its intensity vibrating in the air all about him, and he had a sense as of all the summer’s voices droning in unison. The reins drooped from his listless fingers; the horse moped along as it pleased.
“I have always felt it, vaguely,” Vernon went on, his voice dropping to a low tone, “and this morning it was suddenly revealed to me—”
Miss Greene raised her hand as if to draw it across her brow; her veil stopped her.
“Let’s not talk about that now,” she pleaded. “Let’s enjoy the air and the country. I don’t have them often.” Her hand fell to her lap. The color had gone out of her cheeks. And Vernon suddenly felt that the summer had gone out of the air; a cold wind was blowing as over soiled patches of snow left in shaded depressions of the fields; the earth was brown and bare; the birds were silent. He jerked the horse smartly, and it gave an angry toss of its head, as it broke into its tentative trot.