“But it’s there all the time: I mean, what you really are is there, no matter where you are,” she interrupted.
“Maybe so, but it don’t come out other places. You’ve got the key, Miss Julie. I’ve got the key to the door, but you’ve got the key to what I am.”
But for the most part they did not attempt to phrase it, accepting it simply and easily. They had been cramped and terrified, constricted into their smaller selves, by other people and by their own constrained natures, and now this wider existence trembled into view: an existence set free from fear, where they might be themselves and be happy; and they seized upon it with avidity.
They almost never spoke of Elizabeth. Julie never did, and he but rarely. “My wife’s gone out with Mrs. Johnson. She’s crazy about the movies,” he sometimes said. Once he said, “I offered to go with her, but she said I wasn’t good enough company. She’d rather have anybody’s company but mine.”
“Well, if she leaves him every night like that, of course he’s lonesome,” Julie thought sharply to herself.
They did not meet thus a great number of times—not more than six or seven, all told. They wondered over the miracle of their friendship and they rejoiced in the new life that it brought to them, yet they spoke no word of love to each other. But there fell at last an evening when the summer night had come down over Hart’s Run; when children in pretty, clean frocks called to one another through the dusk; when lovers would have walked the street, if it had not been a war year, with most of the young men gone; when the whole village was relaxed and at ease; and when Julie, sitting sewing by her light, heard the key scrape in the lock, the creak of footsteps on the stairs, and in a moment looking up saw Mr. Bixby before her, but with a face so strange and pinched that she cried out, “What is it? What’s happened?”
He sat down in the rocker and looked at her for a dumb moment. Then he spoke.
“It’s come; my draft call’s come. I got to go.”
“You got to go?” she whispered.
“I just got it from the post office. I got to go in the mornin’. She’s out—my wife’s out. I ain’t told her yet. I came to you, Miss Julie.”