“I asked you because I want very much to have you go. And I do not dislike you.”
“I can’t speak for everybody, but I doubt it. You—you have a way of shouldering folks off, of retiring behind the barbed wire. Folks would be willing enough to like you if you’d let them.”
She pondered this and shook her head slightly.
“Part of what you say is true. There aren’t many people here I want to like me. Haven’t you lived here long enough to see that the people who stay here are the culls, the weak ones? Is there a young man or a young woman here with gumption? Just as soon as a boy amounts to a row of pins, gets an education or has ambition, he goes away. It is the same with the girls. The desirable go, the other sort stay. This is a backwater of life with nothing in it but human driftwood.”
Jim appreciated the insight of her words. She spoke with some exaggeration, but with more sound truth. Her words might be a true arraignment of the average small town, secluded, with insufficient outlet or inlet. They might apply to a thousand villages in Michigan, in Vermont, in New York, in Tennessee. He understood her better than ever before—indeed, here was his first step in comprehension.
“You’re lonesome,” he said, more to himself than to her.
“Yes,” she said, simply. “Lonesome—and bored, horribly bored.”
“I am lonesome, too. Lonesome, but not bored. I have too much on my mind to be bored, which is better for me, probably. So won’t you mend my lonesomeness for one evening by driving with me?”
“If you will say on your honor that you want me to,” she said.
Jim listened for a note of wistfulness in her voice; fancied he distinguished it; was not certain he did.
“On my honor,” he said, half-laughingly, “I do want you.” Then, “Might we not ask Mrs. Stickney to put up a lunch for us and start right away?”
Again she looked at him, for there had been a note of boyish eagerness in his voice, and she smiled a very little. The smile was a revelation; while it lasted her face was not the face of a discontented woman, versed in the unpleasant things of the world, but of a girl, an eager, wistful girl.
How was Jim to know this was an event in Marie Ducharme’s life? How was he to know it was her first social invitation from a man whom she cared to have as a companion, who was fitted by intelligence, by ideals, to be her companion? How was he to know that she had never driven with a young man as other country girls drive with neighboring boys? She was excited. Something welled up inside her that made breathing difficult, but that was delightful.