He mentioned his letter from Mary Wing, causing her to say, "Oh," again.—"Wasn't it wonderful! I knew you'd be interested...."
She was prettier than he remembered—or was it merely that the new hat (trimmed but yesterday) was more becoming than the old?—and her gaze, though not reproachful a bit, had for him a quality subtly appealing. Of the lives and loneliness of young womanly women—of that forced waiting which dams up all energies unused, and hangs the spirit to thrash about in a void, working over each small event to a towering importance—of such matters, a man, even Charles, the authority, knew only through the powers of his imagination. Charles did observe, however, that this girl seemed very glad to see him. And he felt that he now reciprocated these feelings.
"But," said he, with a hypocritically pleasant look at the vehicle, "Santa Claus seems to have remembered you, too! This is something new, isn't it?" said Charles, though feeling that new was hardly the word.
"Yes,—aren't you surprised? My brother in Pittsburg gave it to me. I've just learned to run it! It was so exciting!"
And then, in a pretty, hesitating way, she said: "Won't you let me drive you—home, or wherever you're going? I'd like to, so much. I—want so to tell you all the news."
He protested that he could not think of using Miss Flower as a taxicab. But when she urged it, in pleasing, ingenuous sentences, and explained that she was out only to drive about anywhere, for practice, it did not occur to him to maintain the churlish negative. And, indeed, this was exactly what he had desired from the moment of reading her perfect note last month—sweet reconciliation in just such a casual way, admitting or entailing next to nothing.
So the returning author of the write-ups was to be seen carefully squeezing himself, and "Willcox's," into the seat of Tommy's delightful gift.
"Let's see—the engine's still going—isn't it?" said she, rather superfluously, it seemed, in view of the uproar. "Then I have to kick that and push this over...."
As the girl said, so she did, her look a little anxious, her young face flushed with excitement. And, sure enough, the vehicle, of a self-propelling type, suddenly shook itself with a few loud snorts, and jumped forward with a jar.
"And what sort of car is this?" resumed Charles, dissembling intense curiosity as mere sympathetic interest.