"Tut, tut," remarked his wife from her cot. "Don't complain."
His next remark was equally abrupt.
"There's only one good thing in this Torso hole," he observed with more animation than he had shown all the evening, "and that's the coke-ovens at night—have you noticed them? They are like the fiery pits, smouldering, ready for the damned!"
It was not what she expected from a civil engineer, in Torso, Indiana, and she was at a loss for a reply.
"You'd rather have stayed in Colorado?" she asked frankly.
He turned his face to her and said earnestly, "Did you ever sleep out on a mountain with the stars close above you?—'the vast tellurian galleons' voyaging through space?"
Isabelle suspected that he was quoting poetry, which also seemed odd in
Torso.
"Yes,—my brother and I used to camp out at our home in Connecticut. But I don't suppose you would call our Berkshire Hills mountains."
"No," he replied dryly, "I shouldn't."
And their conversation ended. Isabella wished that the Darnells had not been obliged to go home immediately after supper. The young lawyer knew how to talk to women, and had made himself very agreeable, telling stories of his youth spent among the mountains with a primitive people. She had observed that he drank a good deal of whiskey, and there was something in his black eyes that made her uncomfortable. But he was a man that women liked to think about: he touched their imaginations. She did not talk about him to John on their way home, however, but discussed the Falkners.