“Mind how you carry yer licker, son!”
“Atta boy!”
He advanced with averted eyes, apparently intent upon the cup, but Julie could see the flush of painful color in his face. The soldiers saw it too and jeered with renewed “Atta boy’s.” Julie knew exactly how he felt. All at once, she knew it so hard, so violently, that suddenly she seemed flowing out of herself to him with a sharp projection of sympathy. He felt her eyes upon him, and just as he reached his seat, looked up with a startled expression. There was a momentary rush of contact between them, close, astonishing, almost suffocating to Julie. An instant they were held in each other’s glance. Then he turned away, and handed the cup to his companion. The woman accepted it ungraciously, and putting a white tablet into her mouth, gulped it down with a swallow of water.
“I never did see anybody as awkward as you,” she said. “Spilling water all over that child! Now for gracious sake, keep still an’ let me be quiet a spell, and see ’f this tablet won’t help my headache some.”
He said nothing, but readjusted her pillow for her, restored the drinking-cup to the bag, and pushed the latter well over to his side to make more room for her, although he was himself uncomfortably squeezed, doing it all with that air of worried endeavor, as though Fate had presented him with a portion of life bigger than he could manage. He had also, Julie observed, a detached manner, a little as though his whole self were not present. It was this aloofness that made her comment inwardly, “Well, he certainly is good to that hateful sister of his.” True, the woman did not look like his sister, but she could not be his wife; surely, she thought, he would have had something different, a fuller, more alive personality, to offer to his mate.
After the suit-case was closed, he looked around again at Julie, but she averted her eyes now, staring away out of the window, and would not let herself glance again at him until the train was nearing Hart’s Run, when she straightened up, and began to gather her bundles together. Then she looked across the aisle, and saw that he and his companion were also making preparations to leave the train. Their suit-case was strapped; the woman had tidied herself up and put on her hat, presenting now an appearance completely in accord with the prevailing style; and when the conductor put his head into the train and shouted “Hart’s Run, Hart’s Run,” they rose and moved out into the aisle. Julie was just behind them as they approached the door. “Well, here we are,” the man said, and both he and his companion stooped down to peer through the windows at Hart’s Run, evidently seeing it for the first time.
“Well, ain’t it the awfulest little hole!” the woman ejaculated.
“Oh, maybe it won’t be so bad,” he offered.
By now they had all three moved out to the platform, waiting for the train to come to a standstill, as the dingy little station slid to meet them.
“Maybe! maybe!” she snorted. “I’m about sick of maybe’s! You’ve been maybe-ing all your life. I just bet before you were born somebody said, ‘Maybe it’ll be a boy,’ an’ that’s just what you are—a kind of a maybe man.” She ended with a burst of laughter, pleased by her own wit.