“Lord, I don’t understand him!” Amidon protested. “If I was smart enough to do that, I wouldn’t be working for eighteen per. I guess he just gets lonesome sometimes and looks me up to have somebody to talk to—not that anybody wouldn’t be tickled to hear him, but he says he finds in me a certain raciness and tang of the Hoosier soil—whatever that means. He took me over to the Art Institute last Sunday and gave me a lecture on the pictures, and me not understanding any more than if he’d been talking Chinese. Introduced me to a Frenchman fresh from Paris and told him my ideals were distinctly post-impressionistic. Then we bumped into a college professor, and he made me talk so the guy could note the mellow flavor of my idiom. Can you beat that? Cecil says the hostility of the social classes to each other is preposterous. Got me to take him to a dance the freight-handlers were throwing. It was funny, but they all warmed to him like flies to a leaky sugar-barrel. Wore his evening clothes, white vest and all, and he was the only guy there in an ironed shirt! I thought they’d sure kill him; but not on your life!”
The John Cecil Eaton thus limned was not the austere person Nan knew. Her Eaton was a sedate gentleman who made cryptic remarks to her at parties and was known to be exceedingly conservative in social matters. Amidon, she surmised, was far too keen to subject himself unwillingly to Eaton’s caustic humor, nor was Eaton a man to trouble himself with any one unless he received an adequate return.
“I must be going back,” she said, glancing at her watch. Her casual manner of consulting the pretty trinket on her wrist charmed him. He was pleased with himself that he had been able to carry through an interview with so superior a person.
He had never been more at ease in his most brilliant conversations with the prettiest stenographer in the drug house, whose sole aim in life seemed to be to “call him down” for his freshness. Lunch-counter girls, shop-girls, attractive motion-picture cashiers, were an alluring target for his wit, and the more cruelly they snubbed him the more intensely he admired them. But the stimulus of these adventures was not comparable to the exaltation he experienced from this encounter with Nan Farley. If she had pretended not to remember him he would have hated her cordially; as it was, he liked her immensely. Though she lacked the pert “come-back” of girls behind desks and counters, he felt, nevertheless, that she would give a good account of herself in like positions if exposed to the bold raillery of commercial travelers. He was humble before her kindness. She turned away, hesitated an instant, then took a step toward him and put out her hand. There was something of appeal in the look she gave him as their hands touched—the vaguest hint of an appeal. Her eyes narrowed for an instant with the intentness of her gaze as she searched his face for—sympathy, understanding, confidence. Then she withdrew her hand quickly, aware that his admiration was expressing itself with disconcerting frankness in his friendly gray eyes.
“It’s been nice to see you again,” she said softly. “Good luck!”
“Good luck to you, Miss Farley; I hope to meet you again sometime.”
“Thank you; I hope so too.”
She nodded brightly and moved off along the path toward the clubhouse. He felt absently for his book of cigarette-papers as he reviewed what she had said and what he had said.
He did not resume his whipping of the river, but restored his rod to its case and turned slowly downstream, not neglecting to lift his eyes to the clubhouse as he drifted by.