A tendency.
Underweight.”
He cursed.
His face was a little more like a blade — thinner, grayer.
The cleft of his scowl was deeper.
He seemed more alone.
Eugene came up into the hills again and found them in their rich young summer glory.
Dixieland was partly filled by paying guests.
More arrived.
Eugene was sixteen years old.
He was a College Man.
He walked among the gay crowd of afternoon with a sense of elation, answering the hearty greetings with joy, warming to its thoughtless bombast.
“They tell me you’re batting a thousand down there, son,” yelled Mr. Wood, the plump young pharmacist, who had been told nothing at all.
“That’s right, boy!
Go get ’em.”
The man passed forward cheerfully, up the prosperous glade of his store.
Fans droned.
After all, Eugene thought, he had not done so badly.
He had felt his first wounds.
He had not been broken.
He had seen love’s bitter mystery.
He had lived alone.
30
There was at Dixieland a girl named Laura James.
She was twenty-one years old.
She looked younger.
She was there when he came back.
Laura was a slender girl, of medium height, but looking taller than she was.
She was very firmly moulded: she seemed fresh and washed and clean.
She had thick hair, very straight and blonde, combed in a flat bracelet around her small head.
Her face was white, with small freckles.
Her eyes were soft, candid, cat-green.
He nose was a little too large for her face: it was tilted.
She was not pretty.
She dressed very simply and elegantly in short plaid skirts and waists of knitted silk.
She was the only young person at Dixieland.
Eugene spoke to her with timid hauteur.
He thought her plain and dull.
But he began to sit with her on the porch at night.
Somehow, he began to love her.
He did not know that he loved her.
He talked to her arrogantly and boastfully as they sat in the wooden porch-swing.
But he breathed the clean perfume of her marvellous young body.
He was trapped in the tender cruelty of her clear green eyes, caught in the subtle net of her smile.
Laura James lived in the eastern part of the State, far east even of Pulpit Hill, in a little town built on a salt river of the great coastal plain.
Her father was a wealthy merchant — a wholesale provisioner.
The girl was an only child: she spent extravagantly.
Eugene sat on the porch rail one evening and talked to her.
Before, he had only nodded, or spoken stiffly a word or two.
They began haltingly, aware painfully of gaps in their conversation.