Billy stared out the window for a minute.
“I guess I’ll see if she’ll come home with me and let my mother fix her up,” he said.
The Representative contemplated the back of his assistant’s head, wisely, for a minute, then decided he was wrong. He had never in his experience with agricultural undergraduates come across so little presumption and so much cool initiative. It made a puzzling combination.
Ruth heard his suggestion with surprised gratitude. “It’s just the most ordinary kind of a farm house,” he apologized, “but I think it would be more comfortable and a lot safer than staying another night at the hotel.”
She wasn’t afraid of the farm house, but she hesitated at the imposition; she wasn’t accustomed to such consideration. She also realized her danger, and it decided her.
Of the several things in Billy’s later career that had heightened his mother’s hopes for him, this was the crowning event, and in the whole of her orphaned life Ruth had never known so well how much she missed in not having a mother of her own. She felt no homesickness for her uncle’s luxurious house and her aunt’s efficient, methodical ministrations. She liked to lie in the deep feather bed with a flannel-wrapped hot brick at her feet; and she liked to have Billy’s mother coming to see how she was getting on and staying to regret that he hadn’t brought her sooner; and she liked the strong, nippy sweetness of her black currant drinks, even the warmth of her mustard plasters—and she loved the mother herself.
Somehow Mary knew it, and was happy. She supposed she would have liked any girl Billy had brought home—certainly she would have tried. But such a girl! She had always treasured the hope that sometime there would be such a one, serious, and wise, and considerate—a girl who would sort of take his mother’s place for a man when she had gone.
She confided the hope to Billy while they watched the fire the next night, and Ruth was probably having dinner in her uncle’s house with no trace of her cold left other than an inconvenient red square on her chest that interfered with wearing the regulation dinner-gown. He
looked up surprised. He stretched his imagination for some time, but he couldn’t picture Marjorie Evison in any such capacity at all; neither could he see why any man would want such a thing. He was still pretty young.