He kissed his mother when he went—a habit from which he never deviated, and another of those personal peculiarities which had marked him as different from the other boys of the neighborhood. His mother urged his overcoat upon him in vain—for Jim’s overcoat was distinctly a bad one, while his best suit, now worn every day as a concession to his scholastic position, still looked passably well after several weeks of schoolroom duty. She pressed him to wear a muffler about his neck, but he declined that also. He didn’t need it, he said; but he was thinking of the incongruity of a muffler with no overcoat. It seemed more logical to assume that the weather was milder than it really was, on that sharp October evening, and appear at his best, albeit rather aware of the cold. Jennie was at home, and he was likely to see and be seen of her.
“You can borrow that tester,” said the colonel, “and the cows that go with it, if you can use ’em. They ain’t earning their keep here. But how does the milk tester fit into the curriculum of the school? A decoration?”
“We want to make a few tests of the cows in the neighborhood,” answered Jim. “Just another of my fool notions.”
“All right,” said the colonel. “Take it along. Going to the speakin’?”
“Certainly, he’s going,” said Jennie, entering. “This is my meeting, Jim.”
“Surely, I’m going,” assented Jim. “And I think I’ll run along.”
“I wish we had room for you in the car,” said the colonel. “But I’m going around by Bronson’s to pick up the speaker, and I’ll have a chuck-up load.”
“Not so much of a load as you think,” said Jennie. “I’m going with Jim. The walk will do me good.”
Any candidate warms to her voting population just before election; but Jennie had a special kindness for Jim. He was no longer a farm-hand. The fact that he was coming to be a center of disturbance in the district, and that she quite failed to understand how his eccentric behavior could be harmonized with those principles of teaching which she had imbibed at the state normal school in itself lifted him nearer to equality with her. A public nuisance is really more respectable than a nonentity.
She gave Jim a thrill as she passed through the gate that he opened for her. White moonlight on her white furs suggested purity, exaltation, the essence of womanhood—things far finer in the woman of twenty-seven than the glamour thrown over him by the schoolgirl of sixteen.