“They looked rich, right enough,” he answered when she said it. “And there seemed a lot of good things to eat all corralled in a few places. And you wished you could be let loose inside. But I don’t know as it seemed cruel. That was the way it was, you know, and you couldn’t help it. And there were places where they’d give away some of what was left. I tell you, we were in luck then.”
There was some spirit in his telling it all—a spirit which had surely been with him through his hardest days, a spirit of young mirth in rags—which made her feel subconsciously that the whole experience had, after all, been somehow of the nature of life’s high adventure. He had never been ill or heart-sick, and he laughed when he talked of it, as though the remembrance was not a recalling of disaster.
“Clemmin’ or no clemmin’, I wish I’d lived the loife tha’s lived,” Tummas Hibblethwaite had said.
Her amazement would indeed have been great if she had been told that she secretly shared his feeling.
“It seems as if somehow you had never been dull,” was her method of expressing it.
“Dull! Holy cats! no,” he grinned. “There wasn’t any time for being anything. You just had to keep going.”
She became in time familiar with Mrs. Bowse’s boarding-house and boarders. She knew Mrs. Peck and Mr. Jakes and the young lady from the notion counter (those wonderful shops!). Julius and Jim and the hall bedroom and the tilted chairs and cloud of smoke she saw so often that she felt at home with them.
“Poor Mrs. Bowse,” she said, “must have been a most respectable, motherly, hard-working creature. Really a nice person of her class.” She could not quite visualize the “parlor,” but it must have been warm and comfortable. And the pianola—a piano which you could play without even knowing your notes—What a clever invention! America seemed full of the most wonderfully clever things.
Tembarom was actually uplifted in soul when he discovered that she laid transparent little plans for leading him into talk about New York. She wanted him to talk about it, and the Lord knows he wanted to talk about himself. He had been afraid at first. She might have hated it, as Palford did, and it would have hurt him somehow if she hadn’t understood. But she did. Without quite realizing the fact, she was beginning to love it, to wish she had seen it. Her Somerset vicarage imagination did not allow of such leaps as would be implied by the daring wish that sometime she might see it.
But Tembarom’s imagination was more athletic.