"About eleven, say. Good-bye, miss."
"Good-bye."
She went with him to the door. A great lump of phlox grew on either side of it. She stood between them, and suddenly pointed out over Jury's miserable little root-patch towards Boarzell, heaving its great hummocks against the east.
"What's that?" she asked.
§ 8.
Reuben came away from Cheat Land with odd feelings of annoyance, perplexity, and exhilaration. Alice Jury was queer, and she had insulted him, nevertheless those ten minutes spent with her had left him tingling all over with a strange excitement.
He could not account for it. Women had excited him before, but merely physically. He took it for granted that they had minds and souls like men, but he had not thought much about that aspect of them or allowed it to enter his calculations. Of late he had scarcely troubled about women at all, having something better to think of.
Now he found himself thrown into a kind of dazzle by Alice Jury. He could not explain it. Her personal beauty was negligible—"a liddle stick of a thing," he called her; their conversation had been limited almost entirely to her tactless questions and his forbearing answers.
"She äun't my sort," he mumbled as he walked home, "she äun't at all my sort. Dudn't know where Odiam wur—never heard of Boarzell—oh, yes, seems as she remembered hearing something when I töald her"—and Reuben's lip curled ironically.
He had not told her of his ambitions with regard to Boarzell, and now he found himself wishing that he had done so. He had been affronted by her ignorance, but as his indignation cooled he longed to confide in her. Why, he could not say, for unmistakably she "wasn't his sort"; it was not likely that she would sympathise, and yet he wanted to pour all the treasures of his hope into her indifference. He had never felt like this towards anyone before.