“Look at 'em holdin' hands,” Bert jeered. “Just a-holdin' hands like they was afraid. Look at Mary an' me. Come on an' kick in, you cold-feets. Get together. If you don't, it'll look suspicious. I got my suspicions already. You're framin' somethin' up.”
There was no mistaking his innuendo, and Saxon felt her cheeks flaming.
“Get onto yourself, Bert,” Billy reproved.
“Shut up!” Mary added the weight of her indignation. “You're awfully raw, Bert Wanhope, an' I won't have anything more to do with you—there!”
She withdrew her arms and shoved him away, only to receive him
forgivingly half a dozen seconds afterward.
“Come on, the four of us,” Bert went on irrepressibly. “The
night's young. Let's make a time of it—Pabst's Cafe first, and then
some. What you say, Bill? What you say, Saxon? Mary's game.”
Saxon waited and wondered, half sick with apprehension of this man beside her whom she had known so short a time.
“Nope,” he said slowly. “I gotta get up to a hard day's work to-morrow, and I guess the girls has got to, too.”
Saxon forgave him his tone-deafness. Here was the kind of man she always had known existed. It was for some such man that she had waited. She was twenty-two, and her first marriage offer had come when she was sixteen. The last had occurred only the month before, from the foreman of the washing-room, and he had been good and kind, but not young. But this one beside her—he was strong and kind and good, and YOUNG. She was too young herself not to desire youth. There would have been rest from fancy starch with the foreman, but there would have been no warmth. But this man beside her.... She caught herself on the verge involuntarily of pressing his hand that held hers.
“No, Bert, don't tease; he's right,” Mary was saying. “We've got to get some sleep. It's fancy starch to-morrow, and all day on our feet.”
It came to Saxon with a chill pang that she was surely older than Billy. She stole glances at the smoothness of his face, and the essential boyishness of him, so much desired, shocked her. Of course he would marry some girl years younger than himself, than herself. How old was he? Could it be that he was too young for her? As he seemed to grow inaccessible, she was drawn toward him more compellingly. He was so strong, so gentle. She lived over the events of the day. There was no flaw there. He had considered her and Mary, always. And he had torn the program up and danced only with her. Surely he had liked her, or he would not have done it.