“Well, in gowns.” He spoke unwillingly.
“She would not have any right to be a pessimist about her gowns,” I said. “They are too pretty.”
Here the Lad shot past me with his long stride. He had a way of forgetting me for a minute, and of walking swiftly ahead. He always turned and came back to apologize, and yet I objected decidedly to this phase of his absent-mindedness. It was hardly deferential, I thought, to a person of my years.
“You walk,” I said, when he paused to beg my pardon, “as if you had air in your bones. You must be related to the birds.”
“I was thinking,” he said, “and I forgot. I was thinking how strange it is to find women facing the newer criticism and making up their minds on religious matters. In the South they do not do it. They are all orthodox. It goes with being a woman.”
“I wonder why?”
“Partly because it is expected of them. Most of the men I know want their wives to take the beaten paths, no matter how far they themselves have strayed from them. Marriage of that kind doesn’t seem marriage to me. I want my wife—if I ever have one—to share all of my life, the intellectual part of it as well as the rest.
“That’s one thing I like about your friend,” he continued, apparently unconscious of the connection of ideas. There was a great deal of the scholar’s naïveté about the Lad. “She is so broad-minded. She looks at things as fairly and impersonally as a man does.”
I changed the subject abruptly, for I perceived that the Lad was going to say more than he meant to about Janet.
“How did you reach your present position?” I asked, for lack of something better. “You are an agnostic, I suppose?”