She pondered this and shook her head slightly.
“Part of what you say is true. There aren’t many people here I want to like me. Haven’t you lived here long enough to see that the people who stay here are the culls, the weak ones? Is there a young man or a young woman here with gumption? Just as soon as a boy amounts to a row of pins, gets an education or has ambition, he goes away. It is the same with the girls. The desirable go, the other sort stay. This is a backwater of life with nothing in it but human driftwood.”
Jim appreciated the insight of her words. She spoke with some exaggeration, but with more sound truth. Her words might be a true arraignment of the average small town, secluded, with insufficient outlet or inlet. They might apply to a thousand villages in Michigan, in Vermont, in New York, in Tennessee. He understood her better than ever before—indeed, here was his first step in comprehension.
“You’re lonesome,” he said, more to himself than to her.
“Yes,” she said, simply. “Lonesome—and bored, horribly bored.”
“I am lonesome, too. Lonesome, but not bored. I have too much on my mind to be bored, which is better for me, probably. So won’t you mend my lonesomeness for one evening by driving with me?”
“If you will say on your honor that you want me to,” she said.
Jim listened for a note of wistfulness in her voice; fancied he distinguished it; was not certain he did.
“On my honor,” he said, half-laughingly, “I do want you.” Then, “Might we not ask Mrs. Stickney to put up a lunch for us and start right away?”
Again she looked at him, for there had been a note of boyish eagerness in his voice, and she smiled a very little. The smile was a revelation; while it lasted her face was not the face of a discontented woman, versed in the unpleasant things of the world, but of a girl, an eager, wistful girl.