“I’ve given it up; I’m home to stay,” she answered. “But you needn’t feel badly about it. Of course it must have been necessary—about father and the business, I mean.”
He was embarrassed by her cheerful acceptance of the situation, and stammered, leaving one or two sentences unfinished before he got hold of himself.
“I want you to know I did all I could to prevent the break. It seemed a pity after your father and mine had been together so long. But for some time the plant had needed an active superintendent; just trusting the foremen of the shops wouldn’t serve any longer, and you won’t mind my saying it but your father never liked executive work. I suggested another way of handling it that would have made Mr. Durland a vice-president and free to go on with his experiments, but I couldn’t put it through. I did my best; honestly I did, Grace!”
There was the old boyish eagerness in this appeal. He regarded her fixedly, anxious for some assurance that she understood. She understood only too well that her father had become an encumbrance, and that in plain terms the company couldn’t afford to keep him at his old salary any longer. It was unnecessary for Bob to apologize; but it was like him to seize the first possible moment to express his sympathy. She had always felt the gentleness in him, which was denoted in his blue eyes, which just now shone with the reflection of his eagerness to set himself right with her. He turned his hat continually in his hands—they were finely shaped, with long supple fingers. At the base of his left thumb there was a scar, almost imperceptible, the result of a slash with a jack knife one day in the Durland yard where he had taken her dare to bring down a particular fine spray of blossoms from an old cherry tree. In his anxiety to deliver it unbroken on the bough he had cut himself. She remembered her consternation at seeing the injury, his swaggering attempt to belittle it; his submission to her ministrations as she tied it up with a handkerchief. She was twelve then; he sixteen. He saw the direction of her eyes, lifted the hand and with a smile glanced at the scar. She colored as she realized that he had read her thoughts.
“That was centuries ago,” he said. “We did use to have good times in your back yard! Do you remember the day you tumbled out of the swing and broke your arm? You didn’t cry; you were a good little sport.” And then, his eyes meeting hers, “You’re still a mighty good sport!”
“If I never have anything worse than a broken arm to cry over I’ll be lucky,” she answered evasively.
There was no excuse for lingering; he had expressed his regret at her father’s elimination from Cummings-Durland, and it served no purpose to compare memories of the former friendly relation between the young people of the two families, which were now bound to recede to the vanishing point. But he seemed in no haste to leave her. She on her side was finding pleasurable sensations in the encounter. He had been her first sweetheart, so recognized by the other youngsters of the neighborhood, and they had gone to the same dancing class. And he had kissed her once, shyly, on a night when the Cummingses were giving a children’s party. This had occurred on a dark corner of the veranda. It had never been repeated or referred to between them, but the memory of it was not without its sweetness. She was ashamed of herself for remembering it now. She wondered whether he too remembered it. And there had been those later attentions after the Cummingses had moved away that had encouraged hopes in her own breast not less than in her mother’s that Bob’s early preference might survive the shock of the Cummingses’ translation to the fashionable district, with its inevitable change of social orientation.
Ethel and her mother had questioned the happiness of his marriage, and her mind played upon this as she sat beside him, feeling the charm he had always had for her and wondering a little about the girl he had married whom she had never seen and knew of only from the talk at home. But two years was not long enough; it was ridiculous to assume that he wasn’t happy with his wife.
“We certainly had a lot of fun over there,” he was saying. “I suppose the park fountain plays just the same and the kids still sail their boats in the pond.”
“Yes, and go wading and fall in and have to be fished out by the policeman! But we can’t be kids always, Bob!”