Our gruesome task finished, we turned back. For the moment I wanted to be alone, with my thoughts, my happiness, my uncertainty of Monsieur's power of persuasion, my heaviness of spirit caused by the work behind us. But Tommy ran up and slipped his arm through mine, saying with exaggerated carelessness:
"I'm glad that crescendo of horrors is over—if you'll allow a kind of musical term; but I've got music in my soul to-day."
"It's a funny time for music," I grumbled, "—except funeral marches."
"By the way, did you find out about that other funeral march?"
"No, I forgot," I confessed. "Don't bother me, Tommy; I feel like the devil."
"I know it," he gave my arm a squeeze—for Tommy possessed that characteristic making for a community of mind and spirit that did not wait for explanations. "I know it," he repeated, "but you look a whole lot better—really like your old self! Now, what's the trouble? If you're worrying about the ruins we created back there, cut it out! I'm not bothered over the one or two I might have got! Fact is, nobody knows which of us hit which, anyway. So what is it? I'm not asking, merely insisting!"
So I told him pretty much everything, as one chum can to another.
"You mean she may listen to the little gezabo and go back?" he asked.
"I mean just that. She will if she thinks it has a bigger claim on her. I know how square she is!"
"Besides being square," he said thoughtfully, "there's also something in the make-up of woman that I've never understood: her apparent hankering after sacrifice. When it comes to a show-down between heart and conscience, she'll follow the conscience ten to one—if she's straight. Look at it," he swept his arm toward the prairie, as if innumerable instances were in sight of us. "See the sweet-faced old ladies who never wrote 'Mrs.' before their names—not that they've missed anything, God knows, but just look at 'em! All because some over-finicky parent didn't approve, no doubt! And see the heart starvation stamped on 'daughter's' face, because 'father' was nearly bankrupt and she did write 'Mrs.' to save him! Taking them in retrospect, it's a question if the thing they called sacrifice wasn't plain damn foolishness. Why, hell, Jack, d'you mean to say that the professor and his musty European customs—oh, I can't be profane enough!—the English language is trifling and inadequate! But I'm going to take a hand in this courtship, myself!"