Along this precarious eminence Charlotte moved with the gait that fashion demanded; a mingling of mince, swoop and glide. Her mind was on the plum pelisse. A malicious nail, seeing this, bit at her dipping and voluminous skirt with a snick and a snarl. R-r-rip! it went. Charlotte stepped back with a little cry of dismay—stepped back just too far, lost her footing and tumbled over the edge of the high boardwalk into the muck and slime below.
For the second time in five years Jesse Dick's lounging habit served a good purpose. There he was on Lake Street idly viewing the world when he should have been helping to build it as were the other young men of that hard-working city. He heard her little cry of surprise and fright; saw her topple, a hoop-skirted heap, into the mire. Those same ridiculous hoops, wire traps that they were, rendered her as helpless as a beetle on its back. Jesse Dick's long legs sprang to her rescue, though he could not suppress a smile at her plight. This before he caught a glimpse of the face set off by the frill of blond lace. He picked her up, set her on her feet—little feet in cloth-gaitered side boots and muddied white stockings—and began gently to wipe her sadly soiled second-best merino with his handkerchief, with his shabby coat sleeve, with his coat-tail and, later, with his heart.
"Oh, don't—please—you mustn't—please—oh—" Charlotte kept murmuring, the color high in her cheeks. She was poised at that dangerous pinnacle between tears and laughter; between vexation and mirth. "Oh, please——"
Her vaguely protesting hand, in its flutterings, brushed his blond curly head. He was on his knees tidying her skirts with great deftness and thoroughness. There was about the act an intimacy and a boyish delicacy, too, that had perhaps startled her into her maidenly protest. He had looked up at her then, as she bent down.
"Why, you're the boy!" gasped Charlotte.
"What boy?" No wonder he failed to recognize her as she did him. Her mouth, at the time of the rescue five years before, had been wide open to emit burbles and strangled coughs; her features had been distorted with fright.
"The boy who pulled me out of the river. Long ago. I was going to school. Rush Street. You jumped in. I never knew. But you're the boy. I mean—of course you're grown now. But you are, aren't you? The boy, I mean. The——"
She became silent, looking down at him, her face like a rose in the blond lace frill. He was still on his knees in the mud, brushing at her skirts with a gesture that now was merely mechanical; brushing, as we know, with his heart in his hand.
So, out of the slime of the river and the grime of Lake Street had flowered their romance.