“Say nothin’ to Mrs. Pippy of what’s in that ould head of yours, Sooey Wan. What wit’ one haythen downstairs an’ another upstairs the woman’ll be givin’ notice.”
Sooey Wan pulled open a drawer in the kitchen table and tossed out a handful of bills and silver. “Ketchum ten spot for you today, Julia,” he explained. “You lucky. Ketchum ten spot, ketchum pearl.”
“Faith, you’ll catch more than that if you don’t lear’rn to mind your own business,” Julia warned him.
Long after the household had retired Dan Pritchard sat before the living room fireplace reviewing in his mind’s eye the startling events of that day. He felt depressed, obsessed by an unreasonable, wholly inexplicable presentiment of events still more startling to occur in the not very distant future.
As a rule, the majority of women puzzled Dan, many of them frightened him, and all of them disturbed him. Of all the women he had ever known, Maisie Morrison alone appeared to possess the gift of contributing to his mental rest, his sense of spiritual well-being, even while her practical, definite and positive personality occasionally disturbed his creature comfort, robbed him of that sense of leadership and strength which it is the right of all men to exhibit toward the women of their choice, and appeared to render null and void the necessity for any exhibition of the protective instinct. Infrequently Dan complained to himself that Maisie would be a transcendently wonderful girl if she but possessed just a trifle more imagination; having convinced himself that this was so, he would watch for definite evidence to convict Maisie of such a lack, only to be hurled back into his old state of mental confusion by indubitable evidence that Maisie could read him and his innermost thoughts as readily as if he were a signboard.
When he had complained to Maisie that morning that he was a square peg in the round hole, he had voiced the unrest which all born radicals experience when forced to live conservatively. For Dan knew he was a radical in his viewpoint on many things held sacred by his conservative brethren; he knew he lacked the instinctive caution and constructive conservatism so evident in Maisie. He felt as one whose soul was hobbled with a ball and chain. Maisie, he knew, suffered from no such sense of repression, and this knowledge of her mental freedom sometimes forced upon him a secret, almost womanish irritation.
Sometimes Dan was almost convinced that he ought to rid himself of his habit of introspection, marry Maisie and live happily ever afterward. Then, just as he would be almost on the point of growing loverlike, Maisie would seem to pop out at him from a mental ambush; would seem to lay a cool finger on the soul of him and say quite positively: “Here, Dan, is where it hurts. The pain isn’t where you think it is at all. You are a foolish, imaginative man, and if you do not heed my direction now, you will eventually regret that you did not.”
And then Dan, outwardly smiling and expansive but inwardly glum and shriveling, would tell himself that he could never, never dwell in idyllic married bliss with such a dominating and interfering woman; and Maisie, secretly furious, baffled, would watch him change from the devoted admirer to the warm friend.
Tonight Dan decided that he was, beyond the slightest vestige of a doubt, tremendously fond of Maisie Morrison. But—he was not at all certain that he loved her well enough to ask her to marry him; he marveled now, more than ever previously, what imp of impulse had moved him to kiss her that morning. How warm and sweet and responsive had been that momentary pressure of her lips to his? He visualized again that lambent light that had leaped into her eyes. . . had he gone too far?