I looked at Maurice when he wasn’t watching me, and felt sorry for him. He was a man that 20 anybody would like the looks of. It wasn’t that he was a handsome man––I never could get to like pretty men myself––but there was something about him that made you feel you could trust him. The heavy tan of his face and the grip of his jaw would spoil almost anybody for a beauty man, I suppose, but he had fine eyes and his mouth was all right, and he had a head that you’d like to stand off one side and look at, with hair that seemed to lift and wave with every breath of wind, and when he smiled you felt somehow that he’d saved that particular smile for you. He was no better built than a hundred other men I knew who were going fishing, and he was no bigger than a thousand others sailing out of Gloucester, and not near so big as a lot of others––five feet ten or eleven, maybe, he was, with level shoulders, and very light on his feet––but looking at him you knew he was all there.
After smoking a while and watching him between puffs, it flashed on me all at once that I was pretty thick. A word or two my cousin Nell had let slip––not so much what she said as the way she said it––gave me a hint of a whole lot of things. Looking at Maurice now I asked him if he had seen my cousin or Miss Foster lately.
He flushed up as he looked at me, and I saw that whatever he was thinking of it had not been 21 far away from what I had been thinking of. “No, I haven’t seen them”––slowly. “How is your cousin?”
“Oh, she seems to be all right. They were both in to the store this morning.”
“What doing?” I thought he was beginning to worry, but I tried not to let on that I noticed it. I was beginning to feel like a sleuth, or a detective, or a diplomat, or something.
“Well, I don’t know. Nell said they came in to see me, but all that happened that I had any hand in was to weigh her. She gained another pound last week, and it’s worrying her. The more exercise she takes the heavier she gets, she says. She’s a hundred and thirty-one now. Of course, while they’re there Withrow had to help out and make himself agreeable, especially to Miss Foster, but I can’t see that she warms up to him.”
“Ha? No? You don’t think so?”
“Not much, but maybe it’s her way. She’s pretty frosty generally anyway, different from my cousin––she’s something like.”
“Yes, your cousin is all right,” said Maurice.
“You bet,” I said. “She don’t stand around and chill the air.”