“‘When he was a King in Babylon and I was a Christian Slave?’” she quoted quickly. 246
“Exactly. Only I’d prefer to play the part of the King of Babylon, if it’s all the same to you, niecelet. How does the rest of it go, ‘yet not for a—’ something or other ‘would I wish undone that deed beyond the grave.’ Gosh, my dear, if things were otherwise, I think I could understand how that feller felt. Get on your hat, and let’s get out into the open. My soul is cramped with big potentialities this afternoon. I wish you hadn’t grown up, Eleanor. You are taking my breath away in a peculiar manner. No man likes to have his breath taken away so suddint like. Let’s get out into the rolling prairie of Central Park.”
But the rest of the afternoon was rather a failure. The Park had that peculiar bleakness that foreruns the first promise of spring. The children, that six weeks before were playing in the snow and six weeks later would be searching the turf for dandelions, were in the listless between seasons state of comparative inactivity. There was a deceptive balminess in the air that seemed merely to overlay a penetrating chilliness.
“I’m sorry I’m not more entertaining this afternoon,” Jimmie apologized on the way home. “It isn’t that I am not happy, or that I don’t feel the 247 occasion to be more than ordinarily propitious; I’m silent upon a peak in Darien,—that’s all.”
“I was thinking of something else, too,” Eleanor said.
“I didn’t say I was thinking of something else.”
“People are always thinking of something else when they aren’t talking to each other, aren’t they?”
“Something else, or each other, Eleanor. I wasn’t thinking of something else, I was thinking—well, I won’t tell you exactly—at present. A penny for your thoughts, little one.”
“They aren’t worth it.”
“A penny is a good deal of money. You can buy joy for a penny.”