“Of course I have.”
“What’ll he have to be like?”
She held her tongue. My jauntiness had made her shy. “Come, Ruthie,” I said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I hate to own that you’re grown up. I didn’t think you’d given a thought to marriage. Tell me, what’ll he have to be like?”
I halted, swinging her round so she had to look up in my face. She wore a hunted look of cornered perplexity.
“I’ve never spoken of these things even to mother,” she said. “They all treat me as though I were still a child.”
I wondered what was her trouble. The searchlight swept her. I saw the eagerness for confession on her trembling mouth.
The fire which her beauty had always lacked leapt up. I was amazed at the transformation. She looked reckless. The mask of maidenly tranquillity had slipped aside; I saw all the longing of her unnoticed womanhood focused for an instant in her eyes. The search-light traveled out to sea again. I repeated, “What must he be like?”
She reached up to me, so that her lips almost touched mine. “I think he must be like you,” she whispered.
Of all answers that was the last I had expected. I had thought myself on the brink of some great discovery—that she, too, had some secret lover. I slipped my arm about her and we strolled on through the darkness in silence. Ahead the harbor-lights, reflected across the water, drew nearer. We climbed the beach and the sea-wall, and made our way across the denes to the town.
“You’re all wrong,” I said. “Some day, when you do fall in love, you’ll get a better standard.”