“You can have that,” Jimmy offered magnanimously.
Billy stared in amazement. “Don’t you want it?” he asked.
“Not specially.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Slipped it off the mantel right under her eyes.”
Billy looked at the picture again with the same quiet gravity.
“Guess it doesn’t belong to either of us,” he decided, and carefully held it over the fire until the flames covered it.
Jimmy had not enjoyed such an interesting bit of drama for a long time. He also congratulated himself as a rather successful diplomat.
“I suppose you know you have a chance of the office in her county?” he remarked incidentally. “What are you going to do about it?”
Billy didn’t say definitely what he intended to do about it. That night he stood at his window for a long time in the dark and looked out over the roofs of the city, massed off in dark, blurry squares with the street lights stretching between like ropes of toy electric globes strung along a circus midway. Very confining it seemed to his country-bred instincts, while beyond the last flickering lamp in some laborer’s cottage, the moist brown earth stretched for miles and miles in limitless freedom. A thin white mist rose from it now like incense from the hearth of the god of production. It was the wonderful season of beginnings on the farm, birth and promise everywhere—the eternal old mother pulsing with the first life of the bursting seed, warm, yellow beaks chipping their shells, wobbly-legged colts blinking at the light of day, and weak, trembly, clamorous lambs needing the tenderest care of all, and so few people with the right human instinct to look after them.