Cleland Senior, on the floor below, heard the young voices mingling above him, listened, then quietly withdrew to the library to await events.
Janet looked in later.
"Do they like each other?" he asked in a low, anxious voice.
"Mr. Cleland, sor, Miss Steve is on the floor listenin' to that blessed boy read thim pieces he has wrote in the school paper! Like two lambs they do be together, sor, and the fine little gentleman and little lady they are, God be blessed this April day!"
After a while he went upstairs, cautiously, the soft carpet muffling his tread.
Jim, seated on the side of his bed, was being worshipped, permitting it, accepting it. Stephanie, cross-legged on the floor, adored him with awed, uplifted gaze, her clasped hands lying in her lap.
"To be a writer," Jim condescended to explain, "a man has got to work like the dickens, study everything you ever heard of, go out and have adventures, notice everything that people say and do, how they act and walk and talk. It's a very interesting profession, Steve.... What are you going to be?"
"I don't know," she whispered, "—nothing, I suppose."
"Don't you want to be something? Don't you want to be celebrated?"
She thought, hesitatingly, that it would be pleasant to be celebrated.