"Do you think so?" Lottie encouraged him, knitting. ("You're exactly like a million others—a million billion others.")
"I think so—yes. I've been around a good deal. I've had my ups and downs. I know this little old world from the cellar to the attic, and I don't envy anybody anything."
Lottie smiled a little, and looked at him, and wondered. How smug he was, and oily, and plausible. What seepage was there beneath the placid surface of his dull conversation. Adventure! No, not adventure. Yet this kindly paunchy bachelor knew phases of life that she had never even approached.
"What do you mean when you say you've been around? Around where?"
"Oh, around. You know what I mean. Men—well, a nice girl like you wouldn't just understand how it is with a man, but I mean I been—uh—now—subject to the same temptations other men have. But I know there's nothing in it. Give me a nice little place of my own, my own household, a little bus to run around in and I wouldn't change places with a king. No sir. Nor a poet either." He laughed largely at that, and glanced across the meadow. "I don't know. I guess I'm a funny fella. Different. That's me. Different."
Barren as Lottie's experience with men had been she still knew, as does any woman, that there are certain invariable reactions to certain given statements. These were scientific in their chemical precision. In conversation with the average man you said certain things and immediately got certain results. It was like fishing in a lively trout stream. This dialogue, for example, she or any other woman could have written before it had been spoken. She felt that she could see what was going on inside his head as plainly as though its working were charted. She thought: "He has his mind made up to propose to me but caution tells him to wait. He isn't quite sure of his business yet. He'd really prefer a younger woman but he has told himself that that's foolishness. The thing to do is to settle down. He thinks I'm not bad looking. He isn't crazy about me at all, but he thinks he could work himself up to a pretty good state of enthusiasm. He didn't have what they call his 'fling' in his youth; and he secretly regrets it. If I wanted to I could make him forget his caution and ask me to marry him right now."
He was talking. "I haven't said much about this new business I'm going into. I'm not a fella that talks much. Go ahead and do it, I always say, and then you don't have to talk. What you've done'll talk for you. Yessir!"
Lottie looked at him—at his blunt square hands and the big spatulate thumbs—the little pouches under his eyes—at the thinning hair that he allowed to grow long at the sides so that he could plaster it over the crown, deceiving no one. And she thought, "This is a kind man. What they call a good provider. Generous. Decent, as men go. On the way to fairly certain business success. He'll make what is known as a good husband. You're not so much, Lottie. You're an old girl, with no money; nothing much to look at. Who are you to turn up your nose at him! You're probably a fool to do it——"
"—not an iota of difference to me what other people say or do. I do what I think's right and that's all anybody can do, isn't that true?" He was laboriously following some dull thought of his own.
Lottie jumped up quickly—leapt up, almost, so that the knitting bounded toward him, startled him, as did her sudden movement. "I'm going to get the infants," she said, hurriedly. "It's time we were starting back." Even as he stared up at her she was off. She ran through the little wood, down the knoll full pelt, across the field, her sturdy legs flashing beneath her short skirt, her arms out-stretched. Halfway across the flower-strewn meadow she called to Jesse and Charley. They stood up. Something of her feeling communicated itself to them. They sensed her protest. They ran to meet her, laughing; laughing, they met, joined hands, circled round and round, straining away from each other at arm's length like three mad things there in the May meadow until with a final shout and whoop and high-flung step they dropped panting to the ground.