She’s old enough to be his mother.”
Across Eliza’s white puckered face, thoughtful and reproving, a sly smile broke.
She rubbed her finger under the broad wings of her nose to conceal it, and snickered.
“I tell you what!” she said.
“He’s a chip off the old block.
His father over again,” she whispered.
“It’s in the blood.”
Helen laughed huskily, picking vaguely at her chin, and gazing out across the weedy garden.
“Poor old Ben!” she said, and her eyes, she did not know why, were sheeted with tears.
“Well, ‘Fatty’s’ a lady.
I like her — I don’t care who knows it,” she added defiantly.
“It’s their business anyway.
They’re quiet about it.
You’ve got to say that much for them.”
She was silent a moment.
“Women are crazy about him,” she said.
“They like the quiet ones, don’t they?
He’s a gentleman.”
Eliza shook her head portentously for several moments.
“What do you think!” she whispered, and shook her pursed lips again.
“Always ten years older at least.”
“Poor old Ben!” Helen said again.
“The quiet one, the sad one.
I tell you what!”
Eliza shook her head, unable to speak.
Her eyes too were wet.
They thought of sons and lovers: they drew closer in their communion, they drank the cup of their twin slavery as they thought of the Gant men who would always know hunger, the strangers on the land, the unknown farers who had lost their way.
O lost!
The hands of women were hungry for his crisp hair.
When they came to the paper office to insert advertisements they asked for him.
Frowning gravely, he leaned upon the counter with feet crossed, reading, in a somewhat illiterate monotone, what they had written.
His thin hairy wrists slatted leanly against his starched white cuffs, his strong nervous fingers, ivoried by nicotine, smoothed out the crumples.
Scowling intently, he bent his fine head, erasing, arranging.
Emphatic lady-fingers twitched.
“How’s that?”
Answers vague-voiced, eyes tangled in crisp hair.
“Oh, much better, thank you.”
Wanted: frowning boy-man head for understanding fingers of mature and sympathetic woman.
Unhappily married.
Address Mrs. B.
J.
X., Box 74.
Eight cents a word for one insertion.
“Oh, [tenderly] thank you, Ben.”
“Ben,” said Jack Eaton, the advertising manager, thrusting his plump face into the city editor’s office, “one of your harem’s out there.
She wanted to murder me when I tried to take it.
See if she’s got a friend.”
“Oh, listen to this, won’t you?” Ben snickered fiercely to the City Editor.
“You missed your calling, Eaton.
What you want is the endman’s job with Honeyboy Evans.”