“That’s all right,” she answered. “I don’t care.”
“Well, it’s awfully good of you.” She could see that he was very much relieved. She was glad she had lied about it. “Come in and look at what I’ve got in the shed,” he said, getting away from the subject as quickly as possible.
She followed him around the house, under the old palm-tree that stood there. He had cleared out the woodshed and put in a table and a chair. On the table stood a telegraphic-sounder and key and a round, red, dry battery.
“I’m going to learn to be an operator,” he said. “I’ve got most of the alphabet already. Listen.” He made the instrument click. “I’m going to practise receiving, listening to the wires in the depot. Morrison says I can after I get through work. Telegraph-operators make as much as seventy dollars a month, and some of them, on the fast wires, make a hundred. I guess the train-dispatcher makes more than that.”
“Oh, Paul, really?” She was all enthusiasm. He let her try the key. “I could do it. I know I could,” she said.
He was encouraging.
“Sure you could.” But there was a faint condescension in his tone, and she felt that he was entering a life into which she could not follow him.
“That’s the trouble with this rotten old world,” she said resentfully. “You can get out and do things like that. A girl hasn’t any chance at all.”
“Oh, yes, she has,” he answered. “There’s lots of girl operators. There’s one down the line. Her father’s station agent. And up at Rollo there’s a man and his wife that handle the station between them. He works nights, and she works daytimes. They live over the depot, and if anything goes wrong she can call him.”
“That must be nice,” she said.
“He’s pretty lucky, all right,” Paul agreed. “It isn’t exactly like having her working, of course—right together like that. I guess maybe they couldn’t—been married, unless she did. He didn’t have much, I guess. He isn’t so awful much older than—But anyway, I’d hate to see—anybody I cared about going to work,” he finished desperately. He opened and shut the telegraph-key, and the metallic clacks of the sounder were loud in the stillness. Unsaid things hung between them. Dazzled, tremulous, shaken by the beating of her heart, Helen could not speak.
The palpitant moment was ended by the sound of his mother’s voice. “Paul! Paul, I want some wood.” They laughed shakily.
“I—I guess I better be going,” she said. He made no protest. But when they stood in the woodshed doorway he said all in a rush:
“Look here, if I get a buggy next Sunday, what do you say we go driving somewhere?”
She carried those words home with her, singing as she went.
II
He came early that Sunday afternoon, but she had been ready, waiting, long before she saw the buggy coming down the road.
She had tried to do her hair in a new way, putting it up in rag curlers the night before, working with it for hours that morning in the stuffy attic bedroom before the wavy mirror, combing it, putting it up, taking it down again, with a nervous fluttering in her wrists. In the end she gave it up. She rolled the long braid into its usual mass at the nape of her neck, and pinned on it a black ribbon bow.
She longed for a new white dress to wear that day. Her pink gingham, whose blue-and-white-plaid pattern had faded to blurred lines of mauve and pale pink, was hideous to her as she contemplated it stretched in all its freshly ironed stiffness on the bed. But it was the best she could do.
While she dressed, the sounds of the warm, lazy, spring morning floated in to her through the half-open window. The whinnying of the long-legged colt in the barnyard, the troubled, answering neigh of his mother from the pasture, the cackling of the hens, blended like the notes of a pastoral orchestra with the rising and falling whirr of steel on the grindstone. Under the stunted live-oak in the side-yard her father was sharpening an ax, while her little sister Mabel turned the crank and poured water on the whirling stone. The murmur of their talk came up to her, Mabel’s shrill, continuous chatter, her father’s occasional monosyllables. She heard without listening, and the sounds ran like an undercurrent of contentment in her thoughts.
When she had pinned her collar and put on her straw sailor she stood for a long time gazing into the eyes that looked back at her from the mirror, lost in a formless reverie.
“My land!” her mother said when she appeared in the kitchen. “What’re you all dressed up like that for, this time of day?”
“I’m going driving,” she answered, constrained. She had dreaded the moment. Her mother stopped, the oven door half open, a fork poised in her hand.
“Who with?”
“Paul.” She tried to say the name casually, making an effort to meet her mother’s eyes as usual. It was as if they looked at each other across a wide empty space. Her mother seemed suddenly to see in her a stranger.
“But—good gracious, Helen! You’re only a little girl!” The words were cut across by Tommy’s derisive chant from the table, where he sat licking a mixing-spoon.
“Helen’s got a feller! Helen’s got a feller!”
“Shut up!” she cried. “If you don’t shut up—!”
But he got away from her and, slamming the screen door, yelled from the safe distance of the woodpile:
“Helen’s mad, and I’m glad, an’ I know what will please her—!”
She went into the other room, shutting the door with a shaking hand. She felt that she hated the whole world. Yes, even Paul. Her mother called to her that even if she was going out with a beau, that was no reason she shouldn’t eat something. Dinner wouldn’t be ready till two o’clock, but she ought
