"No," he said, as if to himself, "not that—"
She laid her hand on his arm, "Go by yourself—there's a big work over there, and you can do it best—alone."
He looked down at her, smiling a little, but smiling sadly. "If Jean's mother had lived I should not have been such a weathercock. Will you write to me—promise me that you will write."
"Of course," cheerfully. "Oh, by the way, Julia tells me that dinner will be at three, and that two soldier boys are coming. I rather think I shall like that."
He ran his fingers through his crinkled hair. "What a lot you get out of life, Emily."
"What makes you say that?"
"Little things count so much with you. You are like Jean. She is in seventh Heaven over a snowstorm—or a chocolate soda. It's the youth in her—and it's the youth, too, in you—"
She liked that, and flushed a little. "Perhaps it is because there have been so few big things, Bruce, that the little ones look big."
He had a fleeting sense of what Emily would be like with some big thing in her life—how far would it swing her from her sedate course?
"You have done me a lot of good," he said heartily when she left him to go upstairs to Jean.