Within the next ten days after the talk in Colonel Tom’s office Sam saw Sue Rainey several times coming to or going from her father’s office. Once, meeting in the little lobby by the office entrance, she stopped and put out her hand which Sam took awkwardly. He had a feeling that she would not have regretted an opportunity to continue the sudden little intimacy that had sprung up between them in the few minutes’ talk of Janet Eberly. The feeling did not come from vanity but from a belief in Sam that she was in some way lonely and wanting companionship. Although she had been much courted she lacked, he thought, the talent for comradeship or quick friendliness. “Like Janet she is more than half intellect,” he told himself, and felt a pang of regret for the slight disloyalty of the further thought that there was in Sue a something more substantial and solid than there had been in Janet.
Suddenly Sam began wondering whether or not he would like to marry Sue Rainey. His mind played with the idea. He took it with him to bed, and it went with him all day in his hurried trips through offices and shops. The thought having come to him persisted, and he began seeing her in a new light. The odd half awkward little movements of her hands, and their expressiveness, the brown fine texture of her cheeks, the clearness and honesty of her grey eyes, the quick sympathy and understanding of his feeling for Janet, and the subtle flattery of the notion he had got that she was interested in him--all of these things came and went in his mind while he ran through columns of figures and laid plans for the expansion of the business of the Arms Company. Unconsciously he began to make her a part of his plans for the future.
Later, Sam discovered that during the days after the first talk together the thought of a marriage between them was in Sue’s mind also. After the talk she went home and stood for an hour before the glass studying herself and she once told Sam that in her bed that night she shed tears because she had never been able to arouse in a man the note of tenderness that had been in his voice when he talked to her of Janet.
And then two months after the first talk they had another. Sam, who had not allowed his grief over the loss of Janet or his nightly efforts to drown the sting of it in hard drinking, to check the big forward movement that he felt he was getting into the work of the offices and shops, sat one afternoon deeply absorbed in a pile of factory cost sheets. His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing his white muscular forearms. He was absorbed, intent upon the sheets.