At the door, she hinted:
“Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry
when people thought you were affected?”
“Huh? Kick ’em in the face!
Say, if I were a sea-gull, and all over silver, think
I’d care what a pack of dirty seals thought about
my flying?”
It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust
of Bjornstam’s scorn which carried her through
town. She faced Juanita Haydock, cocked her head
at Maud Dyer’s brief nod, and came home to Bea
radiant. She telephoned Vida Sherwin to “run
over this evening.” She lustily played
Tschaikowsky—the virile chords an echo of
the red laughing philosopher of the tar-paper shack.
(When she hinted to Vida, “Isn’t there
a man here who amuses himself by being irreverent
to the village gods—Bjornstam, some such
a name?” the reform-leader said “Bjornstam?
Oh yes. Fixes things. He’s awfully
impertinent.”)
Kennicott had returned at midnight. At breakfast
he said four several times that he had missed her
every moment.
On her way to market Sam Clark hailed her, “The
top o’ the mornin’ to yez! Going
to stop and pass the time of day mit Sam’l?
Warmer, eh? What’d the doc’s thermometer
say it was? Say, you folks better come round
and visit with us, one of these evenings. Don’t
be so dog-gone proud, staying by yourselves.”
Champ Perry the pioneer, wheat-buyer at the elevator,
stopped her in the post-office, held her hand in his
withered paws, peered at her with faded eyes, and
chuckled, “You are so fresh and blooming, my
dear. Mother was saying t’other day that
a sight of you was better ’n a dose of medicine.”
In the Bon Ton Store she found Guy Pollock tentatively
buying a modest gray scarf. “We haven’t
seen you for so long,” she said. “Wouldn’t
you like to come in and play cribbage, some evening?”
As though he meant it, Pollock begged, “May
I, really?”
While she was purchasing two yards of malines the
vocal Raymie Wutherspoon tiptoed up to her, his long
sallow face bobbing, and he besought, “You’ve
just got to come back to my department and see a pair
of patent leather slippers I set aside for you.”
In a manner of more than sacerdotal reverence he unlaced
her boots, tucked her skirt about her ankles, slid
on the slippers. She took them.
“You’re a good salesman,” she said.
“I’m not a salesman at all! I just
like elegant things. All this is so inartistic.”
He indicated with a forlornly waving hand the shelves
of shoe-boxes, the seat of thin wood perforated in
rosettes, the display of shoe-trees and tin boxes
of blacking, the lithograph of a smirking young woman
with cherry cheeks who proclaimed in the exalted poetry
of advertising, “My tootsies never got hep to
what pedal perfection was till I got a pair of clever
classy Cleopatra Shoes.”
“But sometimes,” Raymie sighed, “there
is a pair of dainty little shoes like these, and I
set them aside for some one who will appreciate.
When I saw these I said right away, ’Wouldn’t
it be nice if they fitted Mrs. Kennicott,’ and
I meant to speak to you first chance I had. I
haven’t forgotten our jolly talks at Mrs. Gurrey’s!”
