“You say I never sulk with you,” he argued. “It isn’t really sulking at all. Of course, I know you were only joking; but it is worse than boorish petulance, it is an absolute dumbness, an inability to speak. In these past weeks I seem to have broken from my bonds, and I believe it is you who have set me free. They say that Lewis Carroll had the same sort of infirmity except in the presence of his beloved children, and I can well understand how he must have suffered and how he had to get used to faring it alone. For my shyness I have paid a great penalty; I have had no playfellows as a child—I never got really acquainted with my own mother. Governesses and tutors used to shirk their job and let me alone. If I hadn’t early learned to read and to like books, I suppose I should have grown up an ignoramus to boot! And you—why, look how I am talking!
“Now for reason number two. For the first time in my life I want to take my father’s money and use it. You’ve made me want to do that. You have filled me with strange worldly ambitions. I want to take my place with other men and bear my share of the burden; and I want to buy you all sorts of things. I have a savage desire to clothe you and feed you and fix up your nest. And I have the wildest visions of a lot of kiddies——”
She almost shot ahead of him.
“Don’t run away,” he called, and caught up with her. “You’re a grown-up woman, and I’m so old that it frightens me. Why in the name of all the holy mysteries at once should we scare off at the thought of children? Woman, it is the most glorious thought in all creation! And they must be clothed,” he went on, “and sent to school and to college and taken to Europe and ‘brought out’ and given a bang-up start in life. And all that takes money, heaps of it. We’ve just got to have money, woman; don’t you see that?”
She saw that—better than he did, perhaps—but she could not trust herself to take up that point in the debate. Fortunately at this moment she caught through the trees a clear light shining far below in Phœbe Norris’s cottage.
“I wonder what Phœbe is doing up at this hour?” she turned the subject. “She usually goes to bed with her Orpingtons.”
“Suppose we find out?” he challenged her.
The returning trolley was grinding up the hill from Branchport and would soon expose them in the road. If the conductors, “Port” or “Champagne,” ever caught a good glimpse of her, the news would spread quickly over Yates county.
“All right,” she agreed, and they struck down the steep road just as the headlight from the car flashed up over the hill.
He talked eloquently all the way down, but while she listened she used the time to summon her scattered forces and get her mental house in order. It had been a wild delight to let him fight down her will, but she was the daughter of her mother and no weakling.