“The very day I am presentable,” he assured her, a finger on his helmet of bandaging.
He was rather more expansive with Mary-Lou Tenafee, though he gave her the facts of the case very simply and swiftly.
“Well,” said Bob Lee’s widow, shaking her smartly sleek head, “I’m surprised—and I’m not! It always did worry me to have Cousin ’Gene push and pull that wild mountain boy into such speedy promotion. He’s a baa-lamb, my poor Cousin ’Gene. Goodness, if I ran Beulah-land the way he runs his mill—your mill, too, I’m sorry to remember, Peter,” she gave him her pretty, comradely smile.
He liked Mary-Lou Tenafee enormously; she seemed to him with her beauty and grace and charm, her firmly and capably run plantation, her sweetly and sternly reared little son, Bob Lee, II, her keen, sane interest in the affairs of her own small world and the big one beyond, a symbol of the New South. “The least jiggle, and I’d have been in love with her,” he reflected now.
“That’s perfectly all right; I want to tear the Altonia down and rebuild, anyway. And I’ll want your help, Mary-Lou.”
“You’ll have it, Peter Piper!”
“About part-time schools and playgrounds and all that stuff, getting the right people interested, I mean.”
“The right people are interested already, Peter,” she said loyally. “Don’t think we’re proud of mills like the Altonia! The leaven’s working, I promise you! Well, but—you’ve told me this about Luke Manders so I can break it to Cousin ’Gene?” She made a rueful face.
“No,” he shook his head, “that wasn’t exactly my idea. You see Heminway—the shark from the bank—will tell him, and show him all the figures, and make it a lot clearer than I could. But I thought, perhaps, if you could just drop a hint to Nancy—” He colored suddenly and the effect was startling in his very pale face.
Mrs. Bob Lee blushed as hotly as he did and caught her full lower lip between her teeth. “Then—you’ve noticed, too,” she said unhappily. “It wasn’t just my imagination.”