“Oh, nothing. I was only wondering if—if it was wrong to hold eyes.”
“Not half as wrong as some other things,” he smiled.
There they were. Two sentences, and they were skimming on the thin ice of conversation towards topics youth loves to discuss “broad-mindedly and impersonally.” Joy hesitated, and drew back.
“Are you sleepy from last night? You don’t look a bit tired.”
“Oh, I’m not. It’ll take several steady nights of this to put me under.” He stretched his impressive length, which she regarded with respect.
“You’re one of these men—who the clinging vines say are ‘so big and strong and yet so kind and gentle’—aren’t you?”
“Kind—and—gentle?” he laughed. “No one ever told me that.”
This time he compelled her to look at him, and under his smiling eyes she suddenly shivered. An irrelevant thought had drifted in—that, when people were as wonderful as he, they always seemed to get everything they wanted, and—they always were wanting something else. But the thought wandered out again at his next words.
“You are the prettiest girl I have ever seen. No—don’t speak! What do you know about it? Last night I suspected—this morning, I know. Morning’s the acid test, you see.”
There was a clatter on the stairs and Jerry bounced into the room. She was chewing gum again. After her came Sarah, evenly pink and white, superbly arrayed, and walking with the carriage of an empress.