The professor dropped on the grass and laughed himself into exhaustion.
“Your—legs,” he got forth finally, but quietly, so the wives on the benches could not hear. “Legs—gave me—fright. They saved you, though. Hadn’t been—for—legs, I might have asked—you to—marry me.... Thirteen!... Gracious!...” He sobered up suddenly and remarked to the spirits of the air, as it were, “There ought to be a law against me.”
Miss Gorgas Levering sat down again cross-legged. She pulled her short skirts over her knees. Then she wound her long braid about her head and fastened it with a sharp twig. Demurely she looked at him, as her elder sister might have done.
“As you were saying, Professeh Blynn,” she mimicked one of her sister’s college friends. “Don’t let me interrupt a pro-po-sal. Small offehs of marriage cheerfully received. First come, first served.”
“Your face is quite old enough,” Professor Blynn speculated.
Her features were as womanly as they ever would be. Some young girls achieve that sort of maturity early; it is only a question of lengthened skirts and twisted hair and they grow up over night. Her vocabulary was strikingly mature, too; sure sign of much reading; and it was streaked with dashes of vigorous young thinking. Her strong coloring heightened the illusion.
“I’m an out-of-doors girl,” she explained. “I play tennis, you know—really play,” she laughed; “and I skate and climb trees and ride.” Then she told him, with comical gravity, that she was the beginning of a new species, and asked if he had read Gardiner’s “The Femine?” “It’s an English book; sort of pamphlet. It tells about the coming woman. She will be strong, first of all. He didn’t convert me. I was always that.”
The instinctive teacher in him brought him quickly to her level. He did not make fun of her, nor patronize. Just the right word or two he said, as he lolled on the grass and deliberately stuffed a brier pipe, enough to take her off the defensive, a position which every intelligent child must assume in the presence of superior elders, and led her to communicate naturally. He talked to her of modern ideas about woman; although his own ideas on the subject were not at all formed. “A Doll’s House” had just been translated into English and was already creating no end of stir. He told her about it. The story of Nora and her vain sacrifice caught hold of her active young mind. He promised her some books, forgetting completely her years as he had done in the beginning; and recommended a lot of German “new thought” just emerging into translations, rather shocking reading in those days, even for males.
Without any self-consciousness they explored each other’s faces as they talked. Certain of his little twists of mouth and eye—he had a habit of screwing up the left side of his face as he propounded, it seemed to assist him as he dug the idea up out of his mind and threw it from him—these she stored away without meaning to, along with his sudden wrinkling of brow, and the odd cock of the neck. Something dramatic in her had always been at work, seizing the high peculiarities of folks for the sake of later caricature. She did not miss that sly rubbing of the hand along the nose, nor his sudden display of white teeth when he smiled.
As a rule, he lost sight of his auditors when he spoke. His classes were always a blur, or rather, they merged into a single personality, which attended, squirmed, laughed as a complete organism. And in his successful dealings with very little children—they always received him into their intimacies without reserve—he had soon discovered that the best results were obtained when one does not in the beginning stare into their faces. You must look far off down the street as you parley with them, or they will catch the assumed interest or the lurking irony in your eye, and shy off.