“Damned ingrate,” Sam mimicked the colonel’s blustering throat tones.
She laughed and picked up the reins. Sam laid his hand on hers.
“How soon?” he asked.
She put her head down near his.
“We’ll waste no time,” she said, blushing.
And then in the presence of a park policeman, in the street by the entrance to the park with the people passing up and down, Sam had his first kiss from Sue Rainey’s lips.
After she rode away Sam walked. He had no sense of the passing of time, wandering through street after street, rearranging and readjusting his outlook on life. What she had said had stirred every vestige of sleeping nobility in him. He thought that he had got hold of the thing he had unconsciously been seeking all his life. His dreams of control of the Rainey Arms Company and the other big things he had planned in business seemed, in the light of their talk, so much nonsense and vanity. “I will live for this! I will live for this!” he kept saying over and over to himself. He imagined he could see the little white things lying in Sue’s arms, and his new love for her and for what they were to accomplish together ran through him and hurt him so that he felt like shouting in the darkened streets. He looked up at the sky and saw the stars and thought they looked down on two new and glorious beings living on the earth.
At a corner he turned and came into a quiet residence street where frame houses stood in the midst of little green lawns and thoughts of his boyhood in the Iowa town came back to him. And then his mind moving forward, he remembered nights in the city when he had stolen away to the arms of women. Hot shame burned in his cheeks and his eyes felt hot.
“I must go to her—I must go to her at her house—now—tonight—and tell her all of these things, and beg her to forgive me,” he thought.
And then the absurdity of such a course striking him he laughed aloud.