Suddenly Sam began wondering whether or not he would like to marry Sue Rainey. His mind played with the idea. He took it with him to bed, and it went with him all day in his hurried trips through offices and shops. The thought having come to him persisted, and he began seeing her in a new light. The odd half awkward little movements of her hands, and their expressiveness, the brown fine texture of her cheeks, the clearness and honesty of her grey eyes, the quick sympathy and understanding of his feeling for Janet, and the subtle flattery of the notion he had got that she was interested in him—all of these things came and went in his mind while he ran through columns of figures and laid plans for the expansion of the business of the Arms Company. Unconsciously he began to make her a part of his plans for the future.
Later, Sam discovered that during the days after the first talk together the thought of a marriage between them was in Sue’s mind also. After the talk she went home and stood for an hour before the glass studying herself and she once told Sam that in her bed that night she shed tears because she had never been able to arouse in a man the note of tenderness that had been in his voice when he talked to her of Janet.
And then two months after the first talk they had another. Sam, who had not allowed his grief over the loss of Janet or his nightly efforts to drown the sting of it in hard drinking, to check the big forward movement that he felt he was getting into the work of the offices and shops, sat one afternoon deeply absorbed in a pile of factory cost sheets. His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing his white muscular forearms. He was absorbed, intent upon the sheets.
“I stepped in,” said a voice above his head.
Glancing up quickly, Sam sprang to his feet. “She must have been there some minutes looking down at me,” he thought, and had a thrill of pleasure in the thought.
Into his mind came the contents of the letter he had written her, and he wondered if after all he had been a fool, and whether the thoughts of a marriage with her were but vagaries. “Perhaps it would not be attractive to either her or myself when we came up to it,” he decided.
“I stepped in,” she began again. “I have been thinking. Some things you said—in the letter and when you talked of your friend Janet who died—some things of men and women and work. You may not remember them. I—I got interested. I—are you a socialist?”
“I believe not,” Sam answered, wondering what had given her that thought. “Are you?”
She laughed and shook her head.
“Just what are you?” she went on. “What do you believe? I am curious to know. I thought your note—you will pardon me—I thought it a kind of pretence.”