The boy was different. Where her future lay visualized before her, heroic deeds, great ambitions, wide charity, he planned years with her, selfish, contented years. As different as smug, satisfied summer from visionary, palpitating spring, he was for her—but she was for all the world.
By shifting his position his lips came close to her bare young arm. It tempted him.
“Don’t read that nonsense,” he said, his eyes on the arm. “And—I’ll never outgrow my foolishness about you, Sidney.”
Then, because he could not help it, he bent over and kissed her arm.
She was just eighteen, and Joe’s devotion was very pleasant. She thrilled to the touch of his lips on her flesh; but she drew her arm away.
“Please—I don’t like that sort of thing.”
“Why not?” His voice was husky.
“It isn’t right. Besides, the neighbors are always looking out the windows.”
The drop from her high standard of right and wrong to the neighbors’ curiosity appealed suddenly to her sense of humor. She threw back her head and laughed. He joined her, after an uncomfortable moment. But he was very much in earnest. He sat, bent forward, turning his new straw hat in his hands.
“I guess you know how I feel. Some of the fellows have crushes on girls and get over them. I’m not like that. Since the first day I saw you I’ve never looked at another girl. Books can say what they like: there are people like that, and I’m one of them.”
There was a touch of dogged pathos in his voice. He was that sort, and Sidney knew it. Fidelity and tenderness—those would be hers if she married him. He would always be there when she wanted him, looking at her with loving eyes, a trifle wistful sometimes because of his lack of those very qualities he so admired in her—her wit, her resourcefulness, her humor. But he would be there, not strong, perhaps, but always loyal.
“I thought, perhaps,” said Joe, growing red and white, and talking to the hat, “that some day, when we’re older, you—you might be willing to marry me, Sid. I’d be awfully good to you.”
It hurt her to say no. Indeed, she could not bring herself to say it. In all her short life she had never willfully inflicted a wound. And because she was young, and did not realize that there is a short cruelty, like the surgeon’s, that is mercy in the end, she temporized.
“There is such a lot of time before we need think of such things! Can’t we just go on the way we are?”
“I’m not very happy the way we are.”
“Why, Joe!”
“Well, I’m not”—doggedly. “You’re pretty and attractive. When I see a fellow staring at you, and I’d like to smash his face for him, I haven’t the right.”
“And a precious good thing for you that you haven’t!” cried Sidney, rather shocked.
There was silence for a moment between them. Sidney, to tell the truth, was obsessed by a vision of Joe, young and hot-eyed, being haled to the police station by virtue of his betrothal responsibilities. The boy was vacillating between relief at having spoken and a heaviness of spirit that came from Sidney’s lack of enthusiastic response.
“Well, what do you think about it?”
“If you are asking me to give you permission to waylay and assault every man who dares to look at me—”
“I guess this is all a joke to you.”
She leaned over and put a tender hand on his arm.
“I don’t want to hurt you; but, Joe, I don’t want to be engaged yet. I don’t want to think about marrying. There’s such a lot to do in the world first. There’s such a lot to see and be.”
“Where?” he demanded bitterly. “Here on this Street? Do you want more time to pull bastings for your mother? Or to slave for your Aunt Harriet? Or to run up and down stairs, carrying towels to roomers? Marry me and let me take care of you.”
Once again her dangerous sense of humor threatened her. He looked so boyish, sitting there with the moonlight on his bright hair, so inadequate to carry out his magnificent offer. Two or three of the star blossoms from the tree had fallen all his head. She lifted them carefully away.
“Let me take care of myself for a while. I’ve never lived my own life. You know what I mean. I’m not unhappy; but I want to do something. And some day I shall,—not anything big; I know. I can’t do that,—but something useful. Then, after years and years, if you still want me, I’ll come back to you.”
“How soon?”
“How can I know that now? But it will be a long time.”
He drew a long breath and got up. All the joy had gone out of the summer night for him, poor lad. He glanced down the Street, where Palmer Howe had gone home happily with Sidney’s friend Christine. Palmer would always know how he stood with Christine. She would never talk about doing things, or being things. Either she would marry Palmer or she would not. But Sidney was not like that. A fellow did not even caress her easily. When he had only kissed her arm—He trembled a little at the memory.
“I shall always want you,” he said. “Only—you will never come back.”
It had not occurred to either of them that this coming back, so tragically considered, was dependent on an entirely problematical going away. Nothing, that early summer night, seemed more unlikely than that Sidney would ever be free to live her own life. The Street, stretching away to the north and to the south in two lines of houses that seemed to meet in the distance, hemmed her in. She had been born in the little brick house, and, as she was of it, so it was of her. Her hands had smoothed and painted the pine floors; her hands had put up the twine on which the morning-glories in the yard covered the fences; had, indeed, with what agonies of slacking lime and adding blueing, whitewashed the fence itself!
“She’s capable,” Aunt Harriet had grumblingly admitted, watching from her sewing-machine Sidney’s strong young arms at this humble spring task.
“She’s wonderful!” her mother had said, as she bent over her hand work. She was not strong enough to run the sewing-machine.
So Joe Drummond stood on the pavement and saw his dream of taking Sidney in his arms fade into an indefinite futurity.
“I’m not going to give you up,” he said doggedly. “When you come back, I’ll be waiting.”
The shock being over, and things only postponed, he dramatized his grief a trifle, thrust his hands savagely into his pockets, and scowled down the Street. In the line of his vision, his quick eye caught a tiny moving shadow, lost it, found it again.
“Great Scott! There goes Reginald!” he cried, and ran after the shadow. “Watch for the McKees’ cat!”
Sidney was running by that time; they were gaining. Their quarry, a four-inch chipmunk, hesitated, gave a protesting squeak, and was caught in Sidney’s hand.
“You wretch!” she cried. “You miserable little beast—with cats everywhere, and not a nut for miles!”
“That reminds me,”—Joe put a hand into his pocket,—“I brought some chestnuts for him, and forgot them. Here.”
Reginald’s escape had rather knocked the tragedy out of the evening. True, Sidney would not marry him for years, but she had practically promised to sometime. And when one is twenty-one, and it is a summer night, and life stretches eternities ahead, what are a few years more or less?
Sidney was holding the tiny squirrel in warm, protecting hands. She smiled up at the boy.
“Good-night, Joe.”
“Good-night. I say, Sidney, it’s more than half an engagement. Won’t you kiss me good-night?”
She hesitated, flushed and palpitating. Kisses were rare in the staid little household to which she belonged.
“I—I think not.”
“Please! I’m not very happy, and it will be something to remember.”