CHAPTER XV
A HALF-HOUR’S LIBERTY
Inside the big Interurban car Lydia and Rankin were talking with a freedom that enormously surprised Lydia. The man had started up with an exclamation of pleasure, had taken her bag, found a vacant seat, put her next the window and sat down by her before Lydia, quite breathless with the shock of seeing him, could do more than notice how vigorous he looked, his tall, spare figure alert and erect, his ruddy hair and close-clipped beard contrasting vividly with his dark-blue flannel shirt and soft black hat. He was on a business trip, evidently, for on his knees he held a tool-box with large ungloved hands, roughened and red.
With his usual sweeping disregard of conventional approaches, he plunged boldly into the matter with which their thoughts were at once occupied. “So this was why Dr. Melton insisted I should take this car. Well, I’m grateful to him! It gives me a chance to relieve my mind of a weight of remorse I’ve been carrying around.”
Lydia looked at him, relieved and surprised at the hearty spontaneity of this opening.
He misunderstood her expression. “You don’t mind, do you, my speaking to you about last fall—my saying I am so very sorry I made you all the trouble Dr. Melton tells me I did? I’m really very sorry!”
Nothing could have more completely disarmed Lydia’s acquired fear of him as the bogey-man of her mother’s exhortations. It is true that she was, as she put it to herself, somewhat taken down by the contrast between her secret thought of him as a wounded, rejected suitor, and this clear-eyed, self-possessed, friendly reality before her; but, after a momentary feeling of pique, coming from a sense of the romantic, superficially grafted on her natural good feeling, she was filled with an immense relief. Lydia was no man-eater. In spite of traditional wisdom, she, like a considerable number of her contemporaries, was as far removed from this stage of feminine development as from a Stone-age appetite for raw meat. She now drew a long breath of the most honest satisfaction that she had done him no harm, and smiled at Rankin. He waited for her to speak, and she finally said: “It’s awfully good of you to put it that way! I’ve been afraid you must have been angry with me and hurt that I—so you didn’t mind at all!”
Rankin smiled at little ruefully at her swift conclusion. “I believe in telling the truth, even to young ladies, and I can not say I didn’t mind at all—or that I don’t now. But I am convinced that you were right in dropping me—out of the realm of acquaintances.” His assumption was, Lydia saw with gratitude, that they were talking simply about a possible acquaintanceship between them. “It’s evidently true—what I told you the very first time I saw you. We don’t belong in the same world.”
As he said this, he looked at her with an expression Lydia thought severe. She protested, “What makes you so sure?”