She pointed to the red scowl in the north, where some startled furnace had opened its giant eye beneath the cloudy mirror of the heavens. "Isn't it marvelous!... Did I ever run away before? I believe when I was four I got tired of home--we were living in Indiana then--packed my rag doll and the puppy into my baby-carriage, and started out.... They caught me before I had gone a block."
He watched the vacant sky. The red glare had abruptly died. "You should see the view from our crest--Crenshaw Hill.... I almost ran away, once. I got as far as the railroad station." He detailed the weeks of punishment that had preceded his attempted escape.
"Your father must be a brute!" The contagious sympathy that shook her tones moved him.
"He's really nice.... His viewpoint is old-fashioned."
"Old fashioned! It's paleolithic. No wonder you ran away."
"He figured that I was his son--accent on the 'his.' He has the idea still."
She stared moodily at the dark blankness of the mountain, then swung beside him on a slender coping at the head of a little park lost in a bend of the highland boulevard.
"That's the trouble with the whole family system," she reflected slowly. "Parents never realize that children grow up. Why not go to the other extreme, and assume that the child has an individuality from the start?"
"You like children?" Something in his thoughtful tone threw a shadow of embarrassment over both, intimate and strangely agreeable.
The talk strayed gently to less personal matters. The moon-glow from a street lamp drizzling through gray-green leaves fell upon her shoulder; the smooth meeting, at the nape of her neck, between shining chestnut hair and glowing flesh caught and held his attention; he wanted to lean over and kiss it--harshly--as he would have kissed Dorothy. What would this girl do? What would she say? She did not dislike him, evidently; and he found her not only holding a deeper, more restful physical charm than the other woman, but also possessed of a mental kinship that he met for the first time in the other sex. Why, at times her impressions seemed even maturer than his own. How could his thoughts dare to link inch-deep Dorothy and this girl together!... But a kiss? No, he had done enough of casual loving; he would keep Jane's body inviolate even from the touch of his lips, until they were ready for the final mating.... Why not, if she would have him? What pitiful things, beside her, had been pert-tongued Virginia, Nellie Tolliver, and the rest! A madonna in face, a woman worthy of all life's adorations.... How astonishing was life, that had flung them together, when he might have missed this dearest hour that he had yet known!