always generous and treats me just like the rest of his children when I’m visiting there.”
“Well, you certainly are one little fool!” said Dana almost roughly. “Why, Lynn, think of the advantages of culture and study abroad! Think of the prestige of having traveled like that! Why, it would do a whole lot toward making up for having been graduated at a little insignificant college if it were known that you had traveled widely. You need sophistication, Lynn. You haven’t grown up! You’re just as innocent as when you were a child! You really need to grow up. You don’t realize that you will have a very prominent position to occupy and need to get ready for it.”
Lynette looked up at him startled, a cloud coming over the brightness of her face, her lips compressed with a sudden indrawing of her breath, the color on her face springing up brighter.
She was silent for a moment, still keeping that wondering, searching gaze on his face, and when she spoke her voice was very quiet and almost cool.
“Do you mean, Dana, that you are ashamed of me as I am?”
“Nonsense!” said Dana impatiently. “There you go, off the handle at once, jumping to conclusions. That’s just what I mean. Like an everlasting thermometer, out to check the temperature and be sure it’s just at seventy. You need poise, Lynn! And travel will give it to you. If your school had been any good you wouldn’t be so utterly childish. If I’m to be called to a big-city church, you will need to get poise. There’s nothing like that to help you up in the world and make you able to hold your own.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Dana,” said Lynette in a small, distant voice, almost like a stranger. “I supposed you were looking forward to preaching the gospel. What has that got to do with social prestige?”
“A very great deal!” said Dana with the air of a teacher who was condescending to explain to the humblest of pupils. “In the first place, a preacher’s wife can do a lot toward helping or hindering her husband’s progress in his work. She is either an asset or a liability. I have always figured that you, Lynette, with your beauty and your goodness your most obvious goodness and your charm of manner would be the greatest kind of an asset. But there is something else. It is something that women of the world have, and that is why they succeed so well.” He floundered a little here, for her eyes were upon him, wondering eyes, as if she had never quite known this Dana before.
“There is a verse in the Bible,” he suddenly said with irritation, “which you should remember. We are bidden to be wise as serpents! That’s what it means, use worldly wisdom. Acquire the poise that the world has and then we shall be better able to cope with”
He paused, searching for a word.
“Sin?” supplied Lynette questioningly. “I hadn’t really ever thought of it in that way.”
There was something in her voice that irritated him still further, for he felt that somehow, while he was attempting to show her how she was wrong, she had instead revealed a weakness in himself. Or could she possibly be laughing at him? He had not made his case as strong as it seemed to him to be. He must try again. You never could force Lynette into a situation, you must always lead her. He ought to have remembered that. She would do anything in the world for him, but of course she did not like his criticism of that little superficial college of hers. That was what was the matter.
“Lynn,” he said, softening his voice to its old lover-like strain, “I see I haven’t made my meaning plain. It’s all because I don’t like to blow my own trumpet and tell you all the great prospects that have come to me. You see, they’ve been saying a lot of fine things about my work, and my ability, up there at the seminary, and I’ve the same as got the choice of two or three prominent pulpits if I just say the word. Let’s quit this foolish quarreling and let me tell the whole thing. Don’t you want to hear what my senior professor said to me the last day, the man who has the reputation of forecasting the future of his students and never making a mistake?”
“Why, surely,” said Lynn graciously, her eyes misty with pride in him, despite her disturbed spirit. “You know I enjoy hearing everything about your seminary life. But it never surprises me, Dana. I knew you would excel. Now, tell me every word.”
There was just the least bit of hurt tone in her voice that he had not felt the same about her, but he did not notice it in his eagerness to tell her, and she was too humble in spirit to assert it again.
So Dana told.
Long incidents of class lore. Struggles for scholarly supremacy, days and nights of grinding. Self-denial of a kind, Dana’s kind, the kind that really got what he wanted. Grudging recognition at first on the part of his friends, instant recognition on the part of the professors. Brilliant accounts of arguments and discussions in class in which he came forward with some original thought, was challenged, and was able to bring notable critics as testimony to substantiate his theory. In short, as she listened, Lynette perceived that this was no longer her mate and equal, her boy companion of the years, to whom she was giving audience, but a distinguished scholar who had already made his mark before his career had fairly opened.
Lynette’s heart was full of joy.
She forgot for the time-being his criticism of herself.
They had passed by the embroidered pastures and valleys, leaving the blue-flowered smoke behind on the mountain, and as they went up higher into a thick grove of trees bordered by fringes of maidenhair fern unbelievably luxuriant, fragilely lovely, Lynette was conscious of a tightening of the muscles round her heart. To think that he was hers, and they were here in sanctuary as it were, alone with the great out of doors to talk together again and get to know the things about one another that had been withheld through the months of separation!
Her eyes rested pridefully upon him as he tossed off his hat and threw himself down upon the moss at her side, and she was conscious again of the quickening heartbeats, the sudden shyness that made her fight for timejust a little space to get used to his nearness again, to the thought that they were really grown up.
“Tell me something, Dana, I’ve often wondered,” she said, suddenly feeling the necessity to cover her shyness with words.
“Yes, dearest!” He smiled down upon her and reached out to take possession of her hand which lay beside him on the moss. It was his first open acknowledgment of the relation between them, which had been tacitly set aside for years of their education, the first time he had ventured on that “dearest” since his very young boy affection which she had gravely restrained with wiser foresight than his own. “We are not old enough for such things yet, Dana, please don’t spoil the beautiful time we are having now,” she had told him. How well she remembered saying it to him, and having to argue it out for days when he would not be convinced. Yet in the end she had conquered, and their friendship had gone on, with only the tacit understanding that there was to be no more sentimentality until they were done with schooldays. Nevertheless they had both looked forward to living their lives side by side to the end and had often referred to the time when that would be as if it were a foregone conclusion.
Dana had wanted to give her a ring two years before, the day he was going back to seminary and she to her college. But she had said no, he must not spend the money now, and it would be time enough to settle those things when they both got home for good.
Lynette had known when she came home this time that she was coming home to face what she had put behind a lovely veil out of sight for a long time, but had always deep in her heart known was waiting there for her when the right time came. Today, she had started out with the knowledge that the time had come. The lessons were learned for both of them, and they had a right to let their hearts speak out to one another and to take their right relations before the world. Yet now that it had come she felt a sudden strange shyness, as if Dana were not the same, as if he had changed into a new man, one that she admired greatly and respected and loved beyond all the world; yet somehow she stood in a strange new awe before him. And so she spoke breathlessly, marking time for her heart to get steady and used to the thrill of his touch in this new way.
“I’ve always wanted to know just why you decided to study for the