"Oh, Paul, really?" She was all enthusiasm. He let her try the key. "I could do it. I know I could," she said.
He was encouraging.
"Sure you could." But there was a faint condescension in his tone, and she felt that he was entering a life into which she could not follow him.
"That's the trouble with this rotten old world," she said resentfully. "You can get out and do things like that. A girl hasn't any chance at all."
"Oh, yes, she has," he answered. "There's lots of girl operators. There's one down the line. Her father's station agent. And up at Rollo there's a man and his wife that handle the station between them. He works nights, and she works daytimes. They live over the depot, and if anything goes wrong she can call him."
"That must be nice," she said.
"He's pretty lucky, all right," Paul agreed. "It isn't exactly like having her working, of course—right together like that. I guess maybe they couldn't—been married, unless she did. He didn't have much, I guess. He isn't so awful much older than—But anyway, I'd hate to see—anybody I cared about going to work," he finished desperately. He opened and shut the telegraph-key, and the metallic clacks of the sounder were loud in the stillness. Unsaid things hung between them. Dazzled, tremulous, shaken by the beating of her heart, Helen could not speak.
The palpitant moment was ended by the sound of his mother's voice. "Paul! Paul, I want some wood." They laughed shakily.
"I—I guess I better be going," she said. He made no protest. But when they stood in the woodshed doorway he said all in a rush:
"Look here, if I get a buggy next Sunday, what do you say we go driving somewhere?"