She laughed, declaring that she could never have been so grasping, and he decided that she was a good fellow. Her manner of ignoring the social chasm that yawned between members of the fashionable Country Club and the Little Ripple Club farther down the river, to which young men who invaded the lower Wabash with sample-cases were acceptable, was wholly in her favor. Her parents had been much poorer than his own: his father had been a teamster; hers had been a common day laborer and a poor stick at that. And recurring to the maternal line, her mother had without shame added to the uncertain family income by taking in washing. His mother, on the other hand, had canned her own fruit and been active in the affairs of the First M.E. Church, serving on committees with the wives of men who owned stores and were therefore of Belleville’s aristocracy; she had even been invited to the parsonage to supper.
If Nan Corrigan’s parents had not perished in an Ohio River flood, and if Timothy Farley, serving on a flood sufferers’ relief committee, had not rescued her from a shanty that was about to topple over by the angry waters, Nan Farley would not be standing there in expensive raiment talking to Jerry Amidon. These facts were not to be ignored and she was conscious of no wish to ignore them.
“I’ve been fortunate, of course,” she said, as though condensing an answer to many questions.
“I guess there’s a good deal in luck,” he replied easily. “If one of our best tie-hoppers hadn’t got killed in a trolley smash-up, I might never have got a chance to try the road. I’d probably have been doing Old Masters with the marking-pot around the shipping-room to the end of time.”
His way of putting things amused her, and her smile heightened his admiration of her dimples.
“I suppose you’re going fishing when you learn how to manage the fly?” she asked, willing to prolong the talk now that they had disposed of the past.
“You never spoke truer words! It’s this way,” he continued confidentially: “When I see a fellow doing something I don’t know how to do, my heart-action isn’t good till I learn the trick. It used to make me sick to have to watch ’em marking boxes at the store, and I began getting down at six A.M. to practice, so when a chance came along I’d be ready to handle the brush. And camping once over Sunday a few miles down this romantic stretch of sandbars, I saw a chap hook a bass with a hand-made fly instead of a worm, and I’ve been waiting until returning prosperity gave me the price of a box of those toys to try it myself. And here you’ve caught me in the act. But don’t give me away to the sports up there.” He indicated the clubhouse with a jerk of the head. “It might injure my credit on the street.”
“Oh, I’ll not give you away!” she replied in his own key. “But did the man you saw catch the fish that time ever enter more fully into your life? I should think he ought to have known how highly you approved of him.”
“Well, I got acquainted with him after that, and he’s taken quite a shine to me, if I may say it which shouldn’t. The name being Eaton—John Cecil—lawyer by trade.”
Her face expressed surprise; then she laughed merrily.