thought, “Just like the daughter will be twenty years from now.” She was very pretty, willowy and girlish with a youthfulness that told of painstaking preservation, effusively gracious, in a subtly superior way, years of social practice in the same groove having equipped her with a supply of stock-phrases ready to be tripped off glibly to any occasion.
“You’ll take good care of our little girl?” she said. “She doesn’t make a practice of running off like this unchaperoned, but we want her to have a good time and it’s really very dull for her here. Since Mr. Evison got the farming bug he has become a hopeless recluse. He runs out to the farm almost every day, and I tell him he’ll soon be driving his own pigs in to the market.” She laughed gaily at the idea, a silvery little descending scale, and Billy wondered why she should have bothered for him. “You’re connected with the Farmers’ Institute or something here yourself, aren’t you?” she continued.
Billy explained as briefly as he could what he was trying to do, and received at the end of each department, the safe comment, “How interesting!”
Of course it wasn’t interesting, as he told it. There’s nothing interesting about dealing out setting eggs and potatoes to school children all day, and trying to round up elusive and indifferent farm laborers at night. Personally he saw
something very much worth while beneath these externals, but weighed by her standards they shrank perceptibly. Not that he attached any importance to her judgment; only she was Marjorie’s mother, and her opinion might matter a good deal.
Nature never intended a motorist to speed through the soft dusk of an April night in the country. The breath of the balm of Gilead tree, the scent of whitethorn blossoms, the rich, earthy odors from fresh-ploughed fields, were lost in a chill, damp wind driving in their faces; the blurry outlines of heavily tasselled willows on the roadside, and lamplight pictures caught through the windows of farm houses—mothers bending over children at their lessons, or a late supper group where the day’s work had been unusually long, all shot past like dizzy films on a crazy reel; the musical roar of high, boiling creeks, and the sleepy chirp of nesting birds were drowned in the pounding of the engine. It wasn’t the hilarious joy of speeding, just the strained sitting-tight and making time. There was a rough, noisy climb up a stony hill, and the city glittered in a bowl below.
They coasted down silently, and when Billy could take his eyes from the wheel, to fairly look at the girl, he found her bright with excitement.
“I wonder if I’ll see anyone I know,” she said.
The play was not inspiring, to make the best
of it. This didn’t matter much to Marjorie, because she had not forgotten her opera glasses, and seemed to find a wonderful interest in searching the audience. Suddenly she brought the glasses down, and directed her attention solely to Billy and the stage. Billy didn’t look near the stage much; his knowledge of plays was limited, but critical, and on the night when the hope of four years had its first gift of reality, it would have seemed a prodigal waste to give his attention to stage fiction. He found quite heaven enough for the present in her nearness, the beauty of her white, regular profile, and her adorable way of leaning the merest trifle over the arm-rest between them.