Another pause, during a most intent mutual inspection.
"My tennis bat," explained Jim, with polite condescension, "needs to be re-strung. That’s why I brought it down from school.... Do you play tennis?"
Cleland Senior, on the floor below, heard the young voices mingling above him, listened, then quietly withdrew to the library to await events.
"Do they like each other?" he asked in a low, anxious voice.
"Mr. Cleland, sor, Miss Steve is on the floor listenin’ to that blessed boy read thim pieces he has wrote in the school paper! Like two lambs they do be together, sor, and the fine little gentleman and little lady they are, God be blessed this April day!"
After a while he went upstairs, cautiously, the soft carpet muffling his tread.
Jim, seated on the side of his bed, was being worshipped, permitting it, accepting it. Stephanie, cross-legged on the floor, adored him with awed, uplifted gaze, her clasped hands lying in her lap.
"To be a writer," Jim condescended to explain, "a man has got to work like the dickens, study everything you ever heard of, go out and have adventures, notice everything that people say and do, how they act and walk and talk. It’s a very interesting profession, Steve.... What are _you_ going to be?"
"I don’t know," she whispered, "—nothing, I suppose."
"Don’t you want to be something? Don’t you want to be celebrated?"
She thought, hesitatingly, that it would be pleasant to be celebrated.
"Then you’d better think up something to do to make the world notice you."
"Father says that the thing you’d rather do to amuse yourself is the proper profession to take up. What do you like to do?"
"You mustn’t ask me. Just think what you’d rather do than anything else."
The girl thought hard, her eyes fixed on him, her brows slightly knitted with the effort at concentration.
"I—I’d honestly really rather just be with dad—and _you_——"
"No, I know. But I can’t think of anything.... Perhaps I could learn to act in a play—or do beautiful dances, or draw pictures——?" her voice continuing in the rising inflection of inquiry.
"Do you like to draw and dance and act in private theatricals?"
"Oh, I never acted in a play or danced folk-dances, except in school. And I never had things of my own to make pictures with—except once I had a piece of blue chalk and I made pictures on the wall in the hall."