Minnie appeared at the door. She was smiling all over.
“He’s come,” she said. “He looks awful big.”
Jane ran down the stairs feeling very much excited. She glanced at herself once more in the mirror under the hat-rack and then passed on to the library door. André was standing on the hearth rug. He did look awfully big, and somehow broader about the shoulders. His coat sleeves were just a little short for his arms. As soon as he saw Jane he broke into a beaming smile.
“Hello, Jane,” he said.
Jane was smiling, too, all over. She walked quickly over to him and held out her hand. His closed completely over it. He didn’t let it go immediately.
“I’m awfully glad to see you,” he said.
His voice was certainly very different. And his cheeks, though just as red, looked just a little darker and harder. Jane realized, with a sudden blush, that André had begun to shave. She almost felt as if she oughtn’t to have noticed a thing like that.
“Won’t you sit down?” said Jane politely.
“Won’t you?” said André with a smile.
Jane suddenly realized that she hadn’t. They both laughed, then, and sat down side by side on the sofa near the hearth.
“I think we might have the fire,” said Jane a little doubtfully. Isabel had it, always, when she had callers. “It’s not very cold, but it makes the room look nicer.”
André jumped up again and struck a match and lit the paper under the birch logs.
“I love this room, anyway,” said André. “It looks just like you.”
Jane flushed with pleasure. She loved the room, too, but she thought it looked just like her father. It was very different from the yellow drawing-room across the hall. It was quite small and the walls were covered with black-walnut bookcases with glass doors, behind which the leather-covered volumes of her father’s library glowed in subdued splendour. Over the bookcases were four steel engravings, one of George Washington and one of Thomas Jefferson and one of Daniel Webster and one of Abraham Lincoln—the four greatest Americans, her father always said. On the mantelpiece was a mahogany bust of William Shakespeare. “The Bard of Avon” was carved in a ribbon scroll on its little pedestal. The sofa by the fire was covered in dark brown velvet and there were two big leather chairs and a revolving one, that Jane used to like to swing on when she was little, behind the big green baize-topped desk of black walnut. Near the desk was a globe on a black-walnut standard, with a barometer hanging over it. That was all there was in the room except a big branching rubber tree in the one west window. Just now the September sun was slanting obliquely in across Pine Street, striking the glass bookcase doors, making them look just a little dusty, and the firelight was dancing on the shiny surfaces of polished walnut, here and there, in the darker corners, and shining on the big brass humidor on the desk that held her father’s cigars.
André sat down again beside her on the sofa.
“What happened to you this summer?” asked André. “You look awfully grown-up.”
“It’s my hair,” said Jane, referring to the knot on her neck. “Nothing happened to any of us except the World’s Fair.”
“I must go right down there,” said André. “I never really saw it before we sailed in June.”
“Muriel wants you to go tomorrow night,” said Jane, and unfolded the plan. André was delighted. He could go, of course.
“And what have you been doing all summer?” asked Jane, when they had exhausted the subject of Muriel’s party. She had a most delightful sensation of being a real young lady. Leading the conversation, like a hostess, with ease and distinction from one subject to another. But it seemed a little strange to be talking to André like this, quite seriously on the library sofa instead of up on the playroom window seat or out in the side yard beneath the willow tree.
His face lit up at the question.
“Oh, Jane!” he said. “It’s been great. You would have just loved it. I couldn’t tell you in my letters. I—I hated to come back, really, except—except—” His voice broke a little and sounded young and trembly. He didn’t look at her. “Except for you.”
That made him seem like the same old André. Jane felt that happy feeling again, deep down inside. But she didn’t know just what to say to him.
“Tell me what it was like,” she ventured, after a little pause.
He began then, in a great rush, just as he always did when he wanted to share things with her. Jane’s eyes grew big and round as she listened, and they never left his face. It sounded just like books. Different books, and all of them nice ones. June in London lodgings. That was like Punch and Dickens and Thackeray. And July in his grandfather’s house in Bath. That was like Jane Austen. And August and September in Paris, working with his clay in an artist’s studio, living with his father in a garret bedroom on the Rue de l’Université, eating at little iron tables on the sidewalks of cafés, and drinking at them too, red wine
