Angela's Business

by Henry Sydnor Harrison

It was, indeed, touch-and-go with Mary Wing's male cousin, here at the turning-point of his life. Had he not forgotten his sweater—well, who knows? Now as the station grew steadily nearer, now as the pretty and familiar voice spoke at his side, one thing was leading to another, and his nervous fidgeting increased.

It occurred to Donald, not for the first time, that he was being rushed about a great deal here lately, with never a minute he could call his own. Managed around all the time—that was about the size of it, here lately: railroaded along into things, with no chance at all to stop and think quietly what he wanted to do.... Then, in a quiet stretch before the turn at Ninth Street, he looked down at the beguiling soft creature beside him, whom he had come to know so easily, so quickly, and so well. His gaze rested upon the rounded girlish bosom, rising and falling with tender young life, at the neck fair as a lily where the V of the thin white waist liberally revealed it, at the big eyes of a woman looking back at him so dark and sweet. And he was surprised at the sensations the look of these eyes now had power to draw up out of him. How? Why? Had absence made the heart mysteriously fonder? Or was it something in the intimacy of this swift adventure together—her sharing his dash for the train like some one who belonged to him?...

"I wish I didn't have to run off this way," he muttered, restively, after a long silence.

"I'll miss you," said she, and the dark eyes fell.

He found the simple reply oddly stirring, arresting, and significant. He was going to be away only three days, and she, this dear, different fellow-being whose gentle weakness already seemed to depend on him, was going to miss him. At some risk, for they now bounced through the traffic of Center Street, he looked down at her again. And once again the sum of all Donald's observations was this, that Angela was a Woman....

No jawing here about the isms of the day, Browning—Tosti—no, Tolstoy—those chaps; no arguing back at you over things a man, of course, knows most about. No; this girl was all Woman....

"I suppose," said she, all at once, "there isn't a train just a little later you could take?"

By singular chance, the thought of the later train had that second knocked at Donald's own mind. Marveling at the coincidence, he hesitated, and answered weakly:—

"Well, there's sort of a train at 7.50—a local. But—this is the train they're expecting me by."

She made no reply. Glancing down, he got no answering glance: she was looking, large-eyed and wistful, into empty space. Her silence, that look, seemed in some subtle way to lay hold on whatever was best in the young man, compellingly. Beyond his understanding, they seemed to envelop Donald with a sudden profound pressure, immensely detaining.