Eaton listened to this recital with as much interest as he ever exhibited in anything that was said to him. He smiled at the young fellow’s frank acknowledgment that it was in a spirit of the most servile imitation that he had gone forth with his fly-box. The ways in which Amidon aped him amused Eaton. He addressed him as “Amidon,” or as “my dear Amidon,” or “my dear fellow,” and talked to him exactly as he talked to his cronies at the University Club; for while he was looked upon as an aristocrat,—the last of an old family that dated back to the beginnings of the town,—at heart he was the soundest of democrats. Jerry’s meeting with Nan on the river bank seemed to him the most delightful of confrontations, and he sought by characteristic means to extract every detail of it.
“Well, sir, after she had been so nice and turned to go, she swung round and came back—actually came back to shake hands! I call that pretty fine; and me just a little scrub that was only a bunch of freckles and as tough a little mutt as ever lived when she used to know me. Why, if she’d said she never heard of me, she’d have put it over and I couldn’t have said a word!”
“She mentioned the meeting to me a little later,” observed Eaton carelessly.
“Like thunder she did!” exploded Jerry. “So you knew all about it and let me go ahead just to kid me! Well, I like that!”
“Merely to get as much light on the subject as possible. We stumble too much in darkness; the truth helps a good deal, Amidon. Miss Farley spoke of you in terms that would not have displeased you. I assure you that she had enjoyed the interview; her description of it was flattering to your tact, your intuitive sense of social values. But it was all very sketchy—you’ve filled in important omissions. For instance, the giving of her hand, as an afterthought, was not mentioned; but I visualize it perfectly from your narrative. We may read into that act good-fellowship, graciousness, and all that sort of thing. She’s a graceful person, and I can quite see her extending a perfectly gloved hand—”
“Wrong for once; she hadn’t on any gloves! But she had a handkerchief. It was drying on a bush.”
“Ah! That is very important. Tears, perhaps? Her presence alone on the shore rather calls for an explanation. If she had gone down there by herself to cry, it is imaginable that life hadn’t been wholly to her taste earlier in the afternoon.”
“She didn’t look as though she had ever cried a tear in her life, and why should she?”
“The Irish,” replied Eaton reflectively, “are a temperamental race. I had knowledge of her—remote but sufficient—before she sought the cool, umbrageous shore. Her companions were the gayest, and they doubtless bored her until a mood of introspection seized her—sorrow, regret, a resolve to do quite differently. Very likely you were a humble instrument of Providence to win her back to a good opinion of herself. So she seemed quite jolly and radiant? Conceivably your appearance caused her to think of her blessings—of her far flight from those scenes your presence summoned from the past.”
“Well, she’s a fine girl all right,” Amidon commented to cover his embarrassment at being unable to follow Eaton in his excursion into the realm of psychology. “You wouldn’t have thought that girl, born in a shack with as good-for-nothing folks as anybody ever had, would grow up to be about the finest living girl! I guess you’d hunt pretty hard before you’d find a girl to touch her.”