Tembarom laughed outright his most hilarious and comforting laugh.
“Sincere?” he said. “He’s sincere down to the ground—in what he’s reaching after; but he’s not going to treble your income or mine. If he ever makes that offer again, you just tell him I’m interested, and that I’ll talk it over with him.”
Their breakfast was at an end, and he got up, laughing again, as he came to her end of the table, and put his arm round her shoulders in the unconventional young caress she adored him for.
“It’s nice to be by ourselves again for a while,” he said. “Let us go for a walk together. Put on the little bonnet and dress that are the color of a mouse. Those little duds just get me. You look so pretty in them.”
The sixteen-year-old blush ran up to the roots of her gray side-ringlets. Just imagine his remembering the color of her dress and bonnet, and thinking that anything could make her look pretty! She was overwhelmed with innocent and grateful confusion. There really was no one else in the least like him.
“I wonder if it is wrong of me to be so pleased,” Miss Alicia thought. “I must make it a subject of prayer.”
She was pathetically serious, having been trained to a view of the great first cause as figuratively embodied in the image of a gigantic, irascible, omnipotent old gentleman specially wrought to fury by feminine follies connected with becoming headgear.
“It has sometimes even seemed to me that our Heavenly Father has a special objection to ladies,” she had once timorously confessed to Tembarom. “I suppose it is because we are so much weaker than men, and so much more given to vanity and petty vices.”
He had caught her in his arms and actually hugged her that time. Their intimacy had reached the point where the affectionate outburst did not alarm her.
“Say,” he had laughed, “it’s not the men who are going to have the biggest pull with the authorities when folks try to get into the place where things are evened up. What I’m going to work my passage with is a list of the few ‘ladies’ I’ve known. You and Ann will be at the head of it. I shall just slide it in at the box-office window and say: ’Just look over this, will you? These were friends of mine, and they were mighty good to me. I guess if they didn’t turn me down, you needn’t. I know they’re in here. Reserved seats. I’m not expecting to be put with them, but if I’m allowed to hang around where they are, that’ll be heaven enough for me.’”