The captain gallantly relieved her of her flowers, and paraded down the road, head up, elbows well out, as he used, thirty years ago, to escort pretty Virginie Morôt in the French quartier of New Orleans. It was long since he had relished conversation as he did with this frank, generous creature. No coquetry about her! It was like talking to a clever, candid boy. Every man felt, in fact, with Cornelia, that she was only a younger brother. He liked the hearty grasp of her big white hand; he liked her honest, downright way of stating things, and her perfect indifference to her own undeniable ugliness. Now, any other woman of her age—thirty, eh? (with a quick critical glance)—would dye her hair: she never cared to hide the streaks of gray through the yellow. She had evidently long ago made up her mind that love and marriage were impossible for women as unprepossessing as she: she stepped freely up, therefore, to level ground with men, and struck hands and made friendships with them precisely as if she were one of themselves.
The captain quite glowed with the fervor of this friendship as he marched along talking energetically. A certain subtle instinct of kinship between them seemed to him to trench upon the supernatural: it covered every thought and taste. She had a keen wit, she grasped his finest ideas: not even Jane laughed at his jokes more heartily. She appreciated his inventive ability: he was not sure that Jane did. There were topics, too, on which he could touch with this mature companion that were caviare to Jane. It was no such mighty matter if he blurted out an oath before her, as he used to do in the army. Something, indeed, in the very presence of the light, full figure keeping step with his own, in the heavy odor of the magnolias and the steady regard of the yellowish-brown eyes, revived within him an old self which belonged to those days in the army—a self which was not the man whom his daughter knew, by any means.
They were talking at the time, as it happened, of his military experience: "I served under Scott in Mexico. Jane thinks me a hero, of course. But I confess to you that I enlisted, in the first place, to keep the wolf out of the house at home. I had spent our last dollar in manufacturing my patent scissors, and they—well, they wouldn't cut anything, unless—I used to suspect Atropos had borrowed them and meant to snip the thread for me, it was stretched so tightly just then."
She looked gravely at his empty sleeve.
The captain caught the glance, and coughed uncomfortably: "Oh, I did not lose that in the service, you understand. No such luck! Five days after I was discharged, after I had come out of every battle with a whole skin, I was on a railway-train going home. Collision: arm taken off at the elbow. If it had happened just one week earlier, I should have had a pension, and Jane—Well, Jane has had a rough time of it, Miss Fleming. But it was my luck!"
They had returned through the woods, and were in sight again of the house standing darkly among the pines. Two gentlemen, pacing up and down the solitary road, came down the hill to meet them.
"Tut! tut! It is that Virginia lawyer who has come up to get into practice here—Judge Rhodes. You know him, Miss Fleming. There's an end to our quiet talk. That fellow besieges a woman with his click-clack: never leaves a crack for a sensible man to edge in a word."
Miss Fleming turned her honest eyes full on his for a moment, but did not speak. The captain's startled, foolish old heart throbbed with a feeling which he had not known since that day in the boat on the bayou when Virginie Morôt first put her warm little hand in his. Virginie as a wife had been a trifle of a shrew. Love in the remembrance often has a bitter twang. But this was friendship! How sweet were the friendship and confidence of a woman! Pretty women of late years approached the captain in his fatherly capacity, much to his disrelish. A man need not have his gray hairs and rheumatism thrown in his teeth at every turn. Miss Fleming, now, saw beneath them: she saw what a gallant young fellow he was at heart. He looked down at her eagerly, but she was carelessly inspecting the judge and his companion.
"Who is the fair-haired, natty little man?"
"Oh! Phil Waring, a young fellow about town. Society man. Too fond of cards. Nice lad, but no experience: no companion for you, Miss Fleming."