She strode out, every muscle responding joyously, after the inert hours. Her eyes turned here and there, inspecting the faces in the cafés, the crowded omnibuses, the idle throng. One need not reflect here: the river of life coursed swiftly, merrily.
CHAPTER III
As the two neared the opera house, Miss Anthon walked more leisurely and paid some attention to her companion. The night was soft for November; she had no wish to immure herself in the close hotel.
“Paris takes me out of my skin,” she said half apologetically. “The whole thing absorbs me; every one seems to be living so eagerly.”
“Puttering about, I should say. They are like a lot of children!” her companion replied unenthusiastically. He had been born on a farm in upper Michigan—he called it Michigāān—and had ridden his pony to school six miles each day, after doing “father’s chores.” A month of Paris had not rubbed off his peasant suspiciousness. As if in defence of his truculent attitude, he added, “You hit me pretty hard, Miss Anthon,—what you said about Americans appreciating only the success of dollars and politics.”
“Why?” The girl focussed her attention wonderingly on her companion.
“That’s what I am after, always have been, since I began teaching elocution and literature up in the old Michigan school. I taught there two years,” he continued simply, with the homely, unconscious conceit of a man interested in his own drama, yet who can relish the picturesqueness of it. “Then I saw my way to some college learning, and in one way or another I kept at the state university for four years. One summer I peddled dry-goods in Iowy and Nebrasky. Another I sold ploughs in Texas.”
His companion sauntered slowly, keeping a sympathetic silence. There was a pleasant kind of brag in his simple epic.
“But I got my chance one red-hot August day, when I met Joe Dinsmore in the smoking-car of a C. B. & Q. train, crossing a Kansas prairie. Big Joe was on his way to look over a piece of land that had come back on a client of his on a mortgage. He took to me, and we rode over to see the sand-heap his man had lent twenty thousand on. The mortgage called it ‘fertile farming land.’ Dinsmore swore and then laughed when he’d seen the miles of drouth and blasted grass and corn. But I got out of the buggy and scraped a hole in the hot ground. Then I took a look at the air; my! it just waltzed and sang over our heads, fit to blister the paint on the team. Well, we drove on, Dinsmore mad, and me quiet, until we came to the Waralla River. Then I smiled.”
His face relaxed at the memory, and he pushed his tall silk hat back to a rakish angle, unconscious of the city, of the whirling carriages, of everything save that vital moment of triumph out on the arid prairie.