“An' you knowed me 'cause I'm so all crooked an' ugly, I reckon,” came the uncompromising return.
Betty Jo turned to Brian: “You are Mr. Burns, are you not, for whom I am to work?”
Brian made no reply,—he really could not speak. “And this,”—Betty Jo included Judy, the manuscript, and the river in a graceful gesture,—“this, I suppose, is the result of what is called 'the artistic temperament'?”
Still the man could find no words. The young woman's presence and her reference to his work brought to him, with overwhelming vividness, the memory of all to which he had so short a time before looked forward, and which was now so hopelessly lost to him. He felt, too, a sense of rebellion that she should have come at such a moment,—that she could stand there with such calm self-possession and with such an air of competency. Her confidence and poise in such contrast to the chaotic turmoil of his own thoughts, and his utter helplessness in the situation which had so suddenly burst upon him, filled him with unreasoning resentment.
Betty Jo must have read in Brian Kent's face something of the suffering that held him there dumb and motionless before her, and so sensed a deeper tragedy than appeared on the surface of the incident; and her own face and voice revealed her understanding as she said, with quiet, but decisive, force: “Mr. Burns, Judy must go to the house. Won't you persuade her?”
Brian started as one aroused from deep abstraction, and went to Judy; while Betty Jo drew a little way apart, and stood looking out over the river.
“Give me the manuscript, Judy,” said Brian gently, “and go on to the house.”
“You-all ain't a-goin' ter sling hit inter the river again?” The words were half-question and half-assertion.
“No,” said Brian. “I promise not to throw it into the river again.”
As Judy gave him the manuscript, she turned her beady eyes in a stealthy, oblique look toward Betty Jo, and whispered: “You-all best tell her 'bout hit. I sure hate her poison-bad; but hit's easy ter see she'd sure know what ter do.”