“You’re not,” he protested hotly. “If you’d read my book, you’d know that. Your face is on every page.”
“A lay figure,” she repeated imperturbably.
She did not gratify his curiosity as to whether she had read Life Till Twenty-one. He waited. At last, driven to desperation, he asked, “What am I to do?”
“Do?”
“Yes. I’ve nothing to keep me in America; I had nothing to bring me over except you. If I stay here and don’t give my people an explanation, they’ll begin to wonder. It won’t be playing the game. So if you don’t care——”
She laughed so gayly that she made all his mountain difficulties seem molehills. “What an old serious! You can’t set times and seasons for love. Sooner or later, if you keep on jogging, everything turns out all right. You’ve got to believe that. It does.”
Since she was his prophetess, he let her optimism go undisputed. He almost shared it. But it didn’t provide him with a certain foundation for his future.
“If you’ll stop drizzling,” she said, “I’ll set Miss Independence free for a run. There!” She pulled the glove off her left hand and made it scamper in the blue and green meadow of her gown. Then, of a sudden, the temptress fingers shot out and caressed him for the merest second.
“Life’s so much more surprising when you don’t know where you’re going. That’s what you said, King Arthur. We don’t know where we’re going—we’re both too young. It’s silly to pretend we do. Let’s agree to be immensely kind to each other. Don’t let’s try to be anything closer as yet. If we do—” She wriggled her shoulders; the little curl trembled violently. “I do hate quarreling.—Hulloa! There’s the sea. We’ll be there in a second.”
The taxi had halted in a line of automobiles. They were on a bare, sun-baked road. On every side salt-marshes stretched away, criss-crossed with ditches which drained into a muddy canal The canal crossed the road; the bridge was up to allow a fishing-boat passage. Over to the left a board-walk ran; behind it the sea flashed like a mirror. Straight ahead, in a straggling line of diminishing importance, hotels rose up. A little over to the right an encampment of match-box summer-cottages sweltered in the glare. Hoardings met the eyes wherever they turned, announcing the choicest places to lunch, to garage or to put up for the night in Long Beach. At no great distance a wooden cow, of more than lifelike proportions, gave a burlesque imitation of the rural, stooping its head as if to graze while its back advertised a brand of malted milk.