Her Infinite Variety Part 5

"Hopes?" laughed Vernon. "Why certainly; we'll adopt it. I'll give my whole time to it between now and then. If they don't adopt that resolution I'll block every other piece of legislation this session, appropriations and all. I guess that will bring them to time!"

"You're very good," she said. "But I fear Mr. Porter's influence."

"Oh, I'll take care of him. You trust it to me. The women will be voting in this state next year."

"And you shall be their candidate for governor!" she cried, clasping her hands.

Vernon colored; he felt a warm thrill course through him, but he waved the nomination aside with his hand. He was about to say something more, but he could not think of anything quickly enough. While he hesitated, Miss Greene looked at her watch.

"I've missed my train," she said, quietly.

Vernon grew red with confusion.

"I beg a thousand pardons!" he said. "It was all my fault and it was certainly very stupid of me."

"It's of no importance. Where must I go to reserve s.p.a.ce on the night train?" said Miss Greene.

Vernon told her, and proffered his services. He was now delighted at the philosophical way in which she accepted the situation-it would have brought the average woman, he reflected, to tears-and then he went on to picture to himself the practical results in improving women's characters that his new measure, as he had already come to regard it, would bring about.

VII

MARIA GREENE would not let Vernon attend to her tickets; she said it was a matter of principle with her; but late in the afternoon, when they had had luncheon, and she had got the tickets herself, she did accept his invitation to drive. The afternoon had justified all the morning's promise of a fine spring day, and as they left the edges of the town and turned into the road that stretched away over the low undulations of ground they call hills in Illinois, and lost itself mysteriously in the country far beyond, Miss Greene became enthusiastic.

"Isn't it glorious!" she cried. "And to think that when I left Chicago last night it was still winter!" She shuddered, as if she would shake off the memory of the city's ugliness. Her face was flushed and she inhaled the sweet air eagerly.

"To be in the country once more!" she went on.

"Did you ever live in the country?" Vernon asked.

"Once," she said, and then after a grave pause she added: "A long time ago."

The road they had turned into was as soft and as smooth as velvet now that the spring had released it from the thrall of winter's mud. It led beside a golf links, and the new greens were already dotted with golfers, who played with the zest they had acc.u.mulated in the forbidding winter months. They showed their enthusiasm by playing bare-armed, as if already it were the height of summer.

As the buggy rolled noiselessly along, Vernon and Miss Greene were silent; the spell of the spring was on them. To their right rolled the prairies, that never can become mere fields, however much they be tilled or fenced. The brown earth, with its tinge of young green here and there, or its newly ploughed clods glistening and steaming in the sun, rolled away like the sea. Far off, standing out black and forbidding against the horizon, they could see the ugly buildings of a coal shaft; behind, above the trees that grew for the city's shade, the convent lifted its tower, and above all, the gray dome of the State House reared itself, dominating the whole scene. The air s.h.i.+mmered in the haze of spring. Birds were chirping in the hedges; now and then a meadow-lark sprang into the air and fled, crying out its strange staccato song as it skimmed the surface of the prairies. Vernon idly snapped the whip as he drove along; neither of them seemed to care to speak. Suddenly they heard a distant, heavy thud. The earth trembled slightly.

"What's that?" said Miss Greene, in some alarm. "It couldn't have been thunder."

"No," said Vernon, "it was the miners, blasting."

"Where?"

"Down in the ground underneath us."

She gave him a strange look which he did not comprehend. Then she turned and glanced quickly at the black breakers of the coal shaft, half a mile away; then at the golf-players.

"Do the mines run under this ground?" she asked, sweeping her hand about and including the links in her gesture.

"Yes, all over here, or rather under here," Vernon said. He was proud of his knowledge of the locality. He thought it argued well that a legislator should be informed on all questions. Maria thought a moment, then she said:

"The golfers above, the miners below."

Vernon looked at her in surprise. The pleasure of the spring had gone out of her eyes.

"Drive on, please," she said.

"There's no danger," said Vernon rea.s.suringly, clucking at his horse, and the beast flung up its head in a spasmodic burst of speed, as livery-stable horses will. The horse did not have to trot very far to bear them away from the crack of the golf-b.a.l.l.s and the dull subterranean echoes of the miners' blasts, but Vernon felt that a cloud had floated all at once over this first spring day. The woman sitting there beside him seemed to withdraw herself to an infinite distance.

"You love the country?" he asked, feeling the need of speech.

"Yes," she said, but she went no farther.

"And you once lived there?"

"Yes," she said again, but she vouchsafed no more. Vernon found a deep curiosity springing within him; he longed to know more about this young woman who in all outward ways seemed to be just like the women he knew, and yet was so essentially different from them. But though he tried, he could not move her to speak of her own life or its affairs. At the last he said boldly:

"Tell me, how did you come to be a lawyer?"

Miss Greene turned to meet his inquisitive gaze.

"How did you?" she asked.

Vernon cracked his whip at the road.

"Well-" he stammered. "I don't know; I had to do something."

"So did I," she replied.

Vernon cut the lazy horse with the whip, and the horse jerked the buggy as it made its professional feint at trotting.

"I did not care to lead a useless life," he said. "I wanted to do something-to have some part in the world's work. The law seemed to be a respectable profession and I felt that maybe I could do some good in politics. I don't think the men of my cla.s.s take as much interest in politics as they should. And then, I'd like to make my own living."

"I have to make mine," said Maria Greene.

"But you never thought of teaching, or nursing, or-well-painting or music, or that sort of thing, did you?"

"No," she replied; "did you?"

Vernon laughed at an absurdity that needed no answering comment, and then he hastened on:

"Of course, you know I think it fine that you should have done as you have. You must have met with discouragements."

She laughed, and Vernon did not note the bitterness there was concealed in the laugh; to him it seemed intended to express only that polite deprecation demanded in the treatment of a personal situation.

"I can sympathize with you there," said Vernon, though Miss Greene had not admitted the need of sympathy. Perhaps it was Vernon's own need of sympathy, or his feeling of the need of it, that made him confess that his own family and friends had never sympathized with him, especially with what he called his work in politics; he felt, at any rate, that he had struck the right note at last, and he went on to a.s.sure her how unusual it was to meet a woman who understood public questions as well as she understood them. And it may have been his curiosity that led him to inquire: