“Why, haven't you heard about him?”
Missy shook her head.
“Why, he's always in the papers! Everywhere he goes, women knock each other down to kiss him! The papers are full of it—don't say you've never heard of it!”
But Missy shook her head again, an expression of distaste on her face. A man that let women knock each other down to kiss him! Missy had ideals about kissing. She had never been kissed by any one but her immediate relatives and some of her girl friends, but she had her dreams of kisses—kisses such as the poets wrote about. Kissing was something fine, beautiful, sacred! As sacred as getting married. But there was nothing sacred about kissing whole bunches of people who knocked each other down—people you didn't even know. Missy felt a surge of revulsion against this Dobson who could so profane a holy thing.
“I think it's disgusting,” she said.
At the unexpected harshness of her tone Raymond glanced at her in some surprise.
“And they call him a hero!” she went on scathingly. “Oh, I guess he's all right,” replied Raymond, who was secretly much impressed by the dash of Dobson. “It's just that women make fools of themselves over him.”
“You mean he makes a fool of himself! I think he's disgusting. I wouldn't go to hear him speak for worlds!”
Raymond wisely changed the subject. And Missy soon enough forgot the disgusting Dobson in the press of nearer trials. She must get at that outline; she wanted to do it, and yet she shrank from beginning. As often happens when the mind is restless, she had an acute desire to do something with her hands. She wanted to go ahead with Marguerite's hat, but mother, who had a headache and was cross, put her foot down. “Not another minute of dawdling till you write that thesis!” she said, and she might as well have been Gabriel—or whoever it is who trumpets on the day of doom.
So Missy once more took up tablet and pencil. But what's the use commanding your mind, “Now, write!” Your mind can't write, can it?—till it knows what it's going to write about. No matter how much the rest of you wants to write.