“And—what did mother say?” he wanted to know.
“I thought she was going to have the curtain let down for a minute. She looked so funny. But you see, she knew I was right. Anybody could see that. She stared at me. And I stared at her, too—only mine was different. Mine was what you call a baby stare. Innocent, you know.” She turned to him again, and something in his eyes checked her. “Oh, I know how that sounded to you,” she said with quick remonstrance. “You never put things like that into words. But you know very well everybody does have special ways of looking when they want to. As if they didn’t understand, or as if they were surprised—or weren’t. You have to do things like that. That’s all I meant.”
“I—think I understand,” said Baron.
They remained silent for a time, and through Baron’s mind a single phrase kept running: “Like raised letters for the blind.” Wasn’t cynicism, wherever it existed, merely a protest by people of refined taste against the inartistic forms which goodness often assumed? And hadn’t he and his family always paid far too little heed to the golden legends of life, and too much to the desire to have them in “raised letters”?
He was aroused by the voice of his companion; by her voice and by the eagerness with which she gazed at a little drama which was being enacted down in the street. An enormous, red-faced beer-driver had stopped his dray at the curb to chat with a ruddy-cheeked, buxom girl with glossy black hair, who was laughing up into his face. The two powerful brewery horses stood patiently at rest, their eyes harboring the placid expression of the weary draft-horse that comes immediately when a stop is made.
“Aren’t they happy?” commented Bonnie May, speaking as if from the indulgent summit of great age.
“I don’t know,” Baron argued. “I shouldn’t think it very probable.”
“But can’t you see that they are?”
“Because they are laughing?”
“That—and their eyes. The way they are looking at each other is just as if they were patting each other on the cheeks—now, isn’t it? I think they are both just beautiful. They look as if they were quite happy, and didn’t care to be anything else.”