Tommy's faithful eyes held a look of doglike affection.
"Oh, if I can—" he quavered.
"I've got to get ahead." Jane was breathless. Her eyes shone.
"I've got to get ahead, Tommy. I can't live all my life like this." She held up the pink strip. "Even if I am a woman, there ought to be something more than making rompers for the rest of my days."
"You might," said the infatuated Tommy, "marry."
"Marry? Marry whom?"
Tommy wished that he might shout "Me!" from the housetops. But he knew the futility of it.
"I shall never marry," she said, "until I find somebody different from anything I've ever seen."
Jane's ideas of men were bounded largely by the weakness of her father and the crudeness of men like Henry Bittinger, Atwood Jones and others of their kind. She didn't consider Tommy at all. He was a nice boy and a faithful friend. His mother, too, was a faithful friend. She classed them together.
Her plan, told with much coming and going of lovely color, was this: She had read that the way to make money was to find the thing that a community lacked and supply it. Considering it seriously she had decided that in Tinkersfield there was need of good food.