Jim had his arm around her and every little way they stopped and pressed against each other and Jim kissed her.

“You ought to live in California⁠—” began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

Her Bible, her copy of Science and Health and her Quarterly were on a table beside her bed in the darkened room.

Jim came over back of her chair and stood there and she could feel him breathing and then he put his arms around her.

She worked out from under him and sat up and straightened her skirt and coat and tried to do something with her hair.

Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

She held herself stiff because she was so frightened and did not know anything else to do and then Jim held her tight against the chair and kissed her.

She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet.

She felt Jim right through the back of the chair and she couldn’t stand it and then something clicked inside of her and the feeling was warmer and softer.

If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it⁠—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

She didn’t want to go to bed yet because she knew Jim would be coming out and she wanted to see him as he went out so she could take the way he looked up to bed with her.

She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall.

Nick caught three of them with his hands and cut their heads off and skinned them while Marjorie chased with her hands in the bucket, finally caught a perch, cut its head off and skinned it.

Then Marjorie rowed the boat out over the channel-bank, holding the line in her teeth, and looking toward Nick, who stood on the shore holding the rod and letting the line run out from the reel.

She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring.

Liz wanted to make something special for Jim to take but she didn’t finally because she was afraid to ask Mrs. Smith for the eggs and flour and afraid if she bought them Mrs. Smith would catch her cooking.

At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again⁠—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven⁠—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anticlimax.

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.