She went through the rooms, straightening a picture, moving a chair, taking up a vase of withering flowers. The curtains stirred in a cool breeze that poured through the open windows and ruffled her hair. It seemed to blow through her thoughts, too; she felt clean and cool and refreshed. With a deep, simple joy she began to think of little things. She would discharge the woman who came to clean; she would polish the windows and dust the furniture and wash the dishes herself. To-morrow she would get some gingham and make aprons. Perhaps Mabel and the baby would come down for a visit; she would write and ask them.
She was cutting roses to fill the emptied vase when she thought of Paul. He came into her thoughts quite simply, as he had come before Bert's return. She thought, with a warmth at her heart and a dimple in her cheek, that she would telephone him to come next Sunday, and she would make a peach shortcake for him.
CHAPTER XIX
The shortcake was a triumph when she set it, steaming hot and oozing amber juice, on the table between them. "You certainly are a wonder, Helen!" Paul said, struck by its crumbling perfection. "Here we haven't been in the house an hour, and with a simple twist of the wrist you give a fellow a dinner like this! Lucky we aren't living a couple of centuries ago. You'd been burned for a witch." His eyes, resting on her, were filled with warm light.
Already he seemed to irradiate a glow of contentment; the hint of sternness in his face had melted in a joy that was almost boyish, and all day there had been a touch of possessive pride in his contemplation of her. It intoxicated her; she felt the exhilaration of victory in her submission to it, and a sense of her power over him gave sparkle to her delight in his nearness.
Her bubbling spirits had been irrepressible: she had flashed into whimsicalities, laughed at him, teased him, melted into sudden tendernesses. Together they had played with light-hearted absurdities, chattering nonsense while they explored a rocky canyon in Alumn Rock Park, a canyon peopled only with bright-eyed furtive creatures of the forest whisking through tangled underbrush and over fallen logs. They had looked at each other with dancing eyes, smothering bursts of mirth like children hiding some riotous joke, when they came down into the holiday crowd around the hot-dog counters at the park gate, and side by side with Portuguese and Italians, they had bought ice-cream cones from a hurdy-gurdy and listened to the band.
Now she looked at him across her own dinner-table, and felt that the last touch of perfection had been given a happy day. She laughed delightedly.
"It's a funny thing when you think of it," he went on, pouring cream over the fruity slices. "Here you're working all week in an office—just about as good a little business woman as they make 'em, I guess—and then on top of it you come home and cook like mother never did. It beats me."
"Well—you see I like to cook," she said. "It's recreation. Lots of successful business men are pretty good golf players. Besides I'm not a business woman any more. I've left the office. Shall I pour your coffee now?"
"Left the office!" he exclaimed. "What for? When?"