“Yes,—I’ll be sorry to go,” he said after a moment. “I like the work, after a fashion, ... but, of course, it isn’t getting me anywhere. I want to write; I’ve always been interested in that. If I could get any kind of work on a newspaper or a magazine, it would suit me fine. My father’s awfully sore at me for being dropped at Princeton. He’s a minister, you know,”—Beardsley laughed deprecatingly with a glance at his companion’s face,—“and he didn’t like it a little bit. I didn’t want to go back home like—well—like the prodigal son, so I wrote him I’d get a job in New York, and see what I could do for myself.”
“I see,” the girl said with another swift survey of his clean features and tight, quaint smile. There was an extraordinary quality about him; he was pathetic somehow; she felt oddly sorry for him.
“I’d like to make good for my father’s sake.... He’s only got his salary.”
“I see,” she repeated.
“But summer’s the deuce of a time to get a job on a newspaper or magazine in New York, everybody tells me.... I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t get something.”
Jeannette wondered what she would do herself. She had begun to enjoy so thoroughly her daily routine, and to take such pride in herself! ... Well, it would be too bad....
They had reached the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Twenty-third Street where the ground was torn up in all four directions, and hardly passable.
“I’ll say a prayer of thankfulness when they get this subway finished, and stop tearing up the streets,” Jeannette remarked.
Once again Roy caught her elbow to help her over the pile of débris, across the skeleton framework of exposed tracks, and again the girl felt the touch of his young fingers like points of flame upon her arm. She caught a shining look in his eyes. Love leaped at her from their blueness. A moment’s giddiness seized her, and there came a terrifying feeling that something dreadful was about to happen, that she and this boy at her side were trembling on the brink of some dreadful catastrophe. Instinct rose in her, strong, combative. She turned abruptly into the open door of a candy shop and steadied herself as she bought a dime’s worth of peppermints.
Emotions, burning, chilling, conflicting, took possession of her the rest of the day. From her typewriter table she covertly studied Beardsley, as he leaned back in his armed swivel-chair before his flat-topped desk, his fingers loosely linked together across his chest, his eyes unseeing, fixed on some distant point through the window’s vista, dictating to the stenographer who bent over her note-book, as she scribbled beside him. What was it about him that moved her so strangely? What was it in his twinkling blue eyes, his quaint mouth with its whimsical smile that stirred her, and set her senses swimming? He was in love with her. Perhaps it was just because he cared so much that she was thus deeply stirred. There had been others, she reminded herself, who had been in love with her, but they had awakened no such emotion.