She didn’t advance, so the voice added, with a mellow laugh in it, “Come in. Why did Gainah go away? Come in, Cousin Pamela. I cannot move from this confounded sofa.”
So he was crippled! Her wild gray eyes darted across the garden and along the hot road. If she could only just softly open that door and slip out without seeing him! A cripple! She might have known that there was something.
She made a desperate step forward: it was so like a fool to stay outside. She had come to the house on certain business, and she must go through with it. Her foot in the arched morocco shoe tapped on the bare oak floor. Then it sunk into a thick carpet. She could not see the occupant of the room yet; he was on a couch in the bay window which looked across the harvest fields. All that she could see was a wall hung with gorgeous flowered paper, a carpet with a green ground and bunches of Provence roses, a round walnut table, and a piano with a closed lid.
It was like coming from December to June at a breath—this transit from the dim ancestral living-room to the parlor with the walnut and velvet suite from the best shop in Liddleshorn. Yet Pamela hardly noticed. The only thing that mattered was the sofa in the bay window. Would that man, that cripple on the sofa, be favorably impressed with her?
She was sick and hot with apprehension. Had any girl been in such a position before? She began to think dimly of early tales that she had read of slave markets, of a poem learnt and recited at school about a quadroon girl.
Of course old Gainah didn’t know all—didn’t know anything that was truth. What an odd old woman! Not pleasant to live with. Not a cheerful house in which to spend the winter! She went slowly over that thick carpet to the bay window, her head down, her upper lip caught fiercely over her lower. When she reached the sofa she was in an agony of shame, and hardly lifted her eyes.
“Do sit down.”
The words were simple, but she liked him from that moment. She felt sure of him. He wouldn’t be—coarse. She sat down. There was a low walnut chair with a green cover drawn into the bay all ready. Then she dared to look up.