“You were awfully mad when I spoke to you,” he said; “but I liked that. I don’t know—somehow you made me think of Joan of Arc.”
“Me?” cried Lexy. “With freckles, and such a temper? You couldn’t imagine me listening to angels, could you?”
“Yes,” he said, “I could.”
She glanced at him to see if he was laughing, but he was not. His eyes met hers with a quiet and steady look.
“I didn’t need to imagine much,” he said. “You’ve told me what you’ve been through, and I can see for myself what you are. I don’t think there ever was another girl like you!”
“Nonsense!” said Lexy, looking away. “I’m just pig-headed—that’s all.”
They had wandered across the fields until they came to a little river, running clear and swift under the elm trees. By tacit consent they sat down on the bank. They didn’t talk much. Houseman skipped stones with skill and earnest attention, and Lexy watched the minnows flitting past through the limpid water. The sky was an unclouded blue. The sunlight came through the branches, where the leaves were scarcely unfolded, and made little golden sparkles on the hurrying current. It was all so quiet—and yet it wasn’t peaceful. The world seemed too young, too warmly and joyously alive, for peace. The spring was waiting in eagerness for the summer. This still, fresh, sunlit day was only an interlude.
Casually, Houseman told her a good deal about himself.
“From Baltimore,” he said. “My people wanted me to go into the navy. My father and grandfather were both navy, but I couldn’t see it. Too cut and dried! I’m on a cargo steamer now, and I like it.”
And this information—with the additional facts that he was twenty-six, that he had two brothers in the navy and three married sisters, and that both of his parents were living—was all that he had to give about himself. Lexy was satisfied. There he was, and any one with eyes to see and ears to listen could understand him. Honest, blunt, and careless, fearing nothing, shirking nothing, and facing life with cheerful unconcern, he was, she thought, a comrade and an ally without an equal.