She sat down, arranging her white draperies under the festoons of smilax, her left hand, from which a big feather fan drooped, resting on her knees, her small, white-slippered foot moving to the sound of the waltz.
"Was it a vow not to grow any more?" she asked with a soft laugh.
"It was," I leaned toward her and the fragrance of the white rose, drooping a little in her wreath of plaits, filled my nostrils, "that I would not stay common."
Her lashes, which had been lowered, were raised suddenly, and I met her eyes. "O Ben Starr, Ben Starr," she said, "how well you have kept it!"
"Do you remember the stormy night when you would not let me take your wet cap because I was a common boy?".
"How hateful I must have been!"
"On that night I determined that I would not grow up to be a common man. That was why I ran away, that was why I went into the tobacco factory, that was why I started to learn Johnson's Dictionary by heart—why I drudged over my Latin, why I went into stocks, why—"
Her eyes had not left my face, but unfurling the big feather fan, she waved it slowly between us. I, who had, in the words of Dr. Theophilus, "no small wits in my head," who could stand, dumb and a clown, in a ballroom, who could even trip up my partner, had found words that could arrest the gaze of the woman before me. To talk at all I must talk of big things, and it was of big things that I now spoke—of poverty, of struggle, of failure, of aspiration. My mind, like my body, was not rounded to the lighter graces, the rippling surface, that society requires. In my everyday clothes, among men, I was at no loss for words, but the high collar and the correctly tied cravat I wore seemed to strangle my throat, until those starry eyes, seeking big things also, had looked into mine. Then I forgot my fruitless efforts at conversation, I forgot the height of my collar, the stiffness of my shirt, the size of my hands and my feet. I forgot that I was a plain man, and remembered only that I was a man. The merely social, the trivial, the commonplace, dropped from my thoughts. My dignity,—the dignity that George Bolingbroke had called that of size,—was restored to me; and beyond the rosy lights and the disturbing music, we stood a man and a woman together. Our consciousness had left the surface of life. We had become acutely aware of each other and aware, too, of the silence in which our eyes wavered and met.
"That was why I starved and sweated and drudged and longed," I added, while her fan waved with its large, slow movement between us, "that was why—"
Her lips parted, she leaned slightly forward, and I saw in her face what I had never seen in the face of a woman before—the bloom of a soul.