"Wait a minute, please," I cried. "When am I going to hear about you—and your side of this dismal body of water?"
She looked back at me serenely.
"Wait till you've got yours all written down," she replied. "You see mine might only mix you up. Mine is so much pleasanter. Good night," she added softly.
CHAPTER VI
Until late that night, and again the next day at my desk down in the warehouse, my thoughts kept drifting back to our talk. With a glow of surprise I found I remembered not only every word she had said, but the tones of her voice as she said it, the changing expressions on her face and in her smiling gray-blue eyes. Her picture rose so vividly at times it was uncanny.
"What do you think of her?" asked Sue.
"Mighty little," I replied. I did not care to discuss her with Sue, for I had not liked Sue's tone at all.
But how little I'd learned about Eleanor's life. Where did she live? I didn't know. When I had hinted at coming to see her she had smilingly put me off. What was this pleasant harbor of hers? "Wait till you've got yours all written down," she had said, and had told me nothing whatever. Yes, I thought disgustedly, I was quite a smart young man. Here I had spent two years in Paris learning how to draw people out. What had she let me draw out of her? What hadn't I let her draw out of me? I wondered how much I had told that girl.
For some reason, in the next few days, my thoughts drifted about with astonishing ease and made prodigious journeys. I roved far back to my childhood, and there the most tempting incidents rose, and solemn little thoughts and terrors, hopes and plans, some I was proud of, some mighty ashamed of. Roots, roots, up they came, as though they'd just been waiting, down there deep inside of me, for that girl and her hoeing.