Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/312

 not so long ago. I was walking in the garden. . . late. . . after midnight. I noticed it."

She sat down in one of the chairs by the stove. "May I stay and talk a moment?"

"Of course."

"Sit down too," she said.

Then he remembered that he was still without a coat, and, seizing it quickly, he put it on and sat down. His mind was all on fire, like a pile of tinder caught by a spark. He had never seen anything like this woman before. She wasn't what a woman who had led such a life should have been. She wasn't hard, or vulgar, or coarse, as he had been taught to believe. She must have been nearly forty years old, and yet she was fresh as the morning. And in her beauty, her voice, her manner, there was an odd quality of excitement which changed the very surface of everything about her. Her very presence seemed to make possible anything in the world.

She was saying, "What do you mean to do about it?"

"About what?"

She made a gesture to include the drawings. "All this."

It seemed to him for the first time that he had never thought of what he meant to do about it. He had just worked, passionately, because he had to work. He hadn't thought of the future at all.

"I don't know . . . I want to work until I can find what I know is here . . . I mean in the Mills and in the Flats. And then . . . some day . . . I . . . I want to go back to Africa. . . . I've been to Africa, you know. I was a missionary once." He thought that from the summit of her worldliness she might laugh at him