"Not the Welds. Mother and I are as poor as can be. Everybody knows that. We have lots of doylies and silver on the table, but very little to eat. We never could afford a meal like this. We're sort of crackers-and-tea codfish, really."
"Oh, now, Miss Weld!" Chug's mother was aghast at such frankness. But Chug looked at the girl. She looked at him. They smiled understandingly at each other.
An hour or so later, after Elizabeth had admired the vegetable garden, the hanging flower-baskets, the new parlour curtains ("I used to do 'em up for folks in town," said Mrs. Scaritt, "so's Chug could go to high school." And "I know it. That's what I call splendid," from the girl), she went home, escorted by Chug.
Chug's hunch proved a good one. In a week he was gone. Thirteen months passed before he saw Elizabeth Weld again. When he did, Chippewa had swung back to normal. The railroad tracks were once more boundary lines.
Chug Scaritt went to France to fight. Three months later Elizabeth Weld went to France to dance. They worked hard at their jobs, these two. Perhaps Elizabeth's task was the more trying. She danced indefatigably, tirelessly, magnificently. Miles, and miles, and miles of dancing. She danced on rough plank floors with cracks an inch wide between the boards. She danced in hospitals, châteaux, canteens, huts; at Bordeaux, Verdun, Tours, Paris. Five girls, often, to five hundred boys. Every two weeks she danced out a pair of shoes. Her feet, when she went to bed at night, were throbbing, burning, aching, swollen. No hot water. You let them throb, and burn, and ache, and swell until you fell asleep. She danced with big blond bucks, and with little swarthy doughboys from New York's East Side. She danced with privates, lieutenants, captains; and once with a general. But never a dance with Chug.
Once or twice she remembered those far-away Chippewa golf-club dances. She was the girl who used to sit there against the wall! She used to look away with pretended indifference when a man crossed the floor toward her—her heart leaping a little. He would always go to the girl next to her. She would sit there with a set smile on her face, and the taste of ashes in her mouth. And those shoddy tulle evening dresses her mother had made her wear! Girlish, she had called them. A girl in thick-lensed glasses should not wear tulle evening frocks with a girlish note. Elizabeth had always felt comic in them. Yet there she had sat, shrinking lest the odious Oakley, of the fat white fingers and the wheezy breath, should ask her to dance.
She reflected, humorously, that if the miles of dancing she had done in the past year were placed end to end, as they do it in the almanac's fascinating facts, they must surely reach to Mars and return.
Whenever the hut door opened to admit a tall, graceful, lean brown figure her heart would give a little leap and a skip. As the door did this on an average of a thousand times daily her cardiac processes might be said to have been alarmingly accelerated.
Sometimes—though they did not know it—she and Chug were within a half hour's ride of each other. In all those months they never once met.
Elizabeth Weld came back to Chippewa in June. The First National Bank Building seemed to have shrunk; and she thought her mother looked old in that youthful hat. But she was glad to be home and said so.