“We hadn’t time for these things,” said he to the county superintendent, “in the regular class work—and it’s getting time to take them up if we are to clean out the smut in next year’s crop.”
They repeated Whittier’s Corn Song in concert, and school was out.
Alone with her in the old schoolhouse, Jim confronted Jennie in the flesh. She felt a sense of his agitation, but if she had known the power of it, she would have been astonished. Since that Christmas afternoon when she had undertaken to follow Mr. Peterson’s advice and line Yim Irwin up, Jim had gone through an inward transformation. He had passed from a late, cold, backward sexual spring, into a warm June of the spirit, in which he had walked amid roses and lilies with Jennie. He was in love with her. He knew how insane it was, how much less than nothing had taken place in his circumstances to justify the hope that he could ever emerge from the state in which she would not say “Humph!” at the thought that he could marry her or any one else. Yet, he had made up his mind that he would marry Jennie Woodruff .... She ought never have tried to line him up. She knew not what she did.
He saw her through clouds of rose and pink; but she looked at him as at a foolish man who was making trouble for her, chasing rainbows at her expense, and deeply vexing her. She was in a cold official frame of mind.
“Jim,” said she, “do you know that you are facing trouble?”
“Trouble,” said Jim, “is the natural condition of a man in my state of mind. But it is going to be a delicious sort of tribulation.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she replied in perfect honesty.
“Then I don’t know what you mean,” replied Jim.
“Jim,” she said pleadingly, “I want you to give up this sort of teaching. Can’t you see it’s all wrong?”
“No,” answered Jim, in much the manner of a man who has been stabbed by his sweetheart. “I can’t see that it’s wrong. It’s the only sort I can do. What do you see wrong in it?”