“You like her, don't you, a lot?”
“I confess I do. There is something indescribably winning in her manner. I think her marriage was not at all a happy one.”
Perkins shook his head wisely: “He must have been too old for her, you know.”
“He was fifty years her senior, she has told me.”
Perkins was expressing his amazement at such a marriage, when the door opened and Margaret appeared on the scene. An embarrassed silence fell upon him at once. He barely managed to answer the greeting she gave him.
Long before that Monday was ended Ballard's interest in his cousin' had become tremendous. When night came he was her abject slave,—her worshipful admirer who demanded but one privilege, that he might still be allowed to worship—yet no one could have asked for less than she. She was almost timidly sensitive about being a care or burden to him or to his mother. Despite her habitual shrinking from nearer contact or sympathy, Perkins sat for the most of the day on a small corner of his chair, his knees tight together and his toes turned most resolutely in, like a plump little saffron-headed Trojan, heroically resolved on her amusement. The tension under which he put himself, was so stupendous that he absent-mindedly twisted every available button from his coat. He talked on innumerable topics: told her all about himself, “Not because I think myself at all unusual,” he had been careful to explain, “but because I am so perfectly acquainted with the subject.”
He racked his brain for fluent descriptions concerning his loftier emotions—told her his most cherished ambitions—“things I should never dream of telling any one else,” he said very truthfully. “But don't you know, I guess you call for the best that is in me.”
He launched forth in quest of miscellaneous data and was soon telling her of Franz Becker and Philip Southard. When he told her Becker was a musician and Margaret told him that music was the one thing she loved above all else, he felt as happy as though he had discovered a gold mine in the coal scuttle. So fascinated was he that during the ensuing half-hour he talked a good deal more music than he knew, and at last, in answer to a question she asked, he found himself manfully seeking to formulate a concise history of the United States.
In short, Perkins did much that day that a Solomon would have feared to undertake. Late in the afternoon the wind died down and the rain ceased. The clouds drifted from before the slowly sinking sun, and his crimson flames burned in the red west.
Together they went into the yard. It had become quite warm with the approach of the evening, but Margaret was folded in a great fur wrap. “I am always cold,” she had said.