Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/467

 minute to think of it yourself. They keep you up in the air all the time, whooping it up about your duty to 'win out!' to win the game! Sure, any man that's got blood in his veins, wants to win the game. But which game? It's all very well, turning a boy into a grown-up human being, but you've got to …"

"I wonder," broke in Marise thoughtfully, "I wonder what might turn a girl into a grown-up human being?" And then before Neale could open his lips she blushed, shook her head as if at a slip on her part, and said quickly, "Oh, there's my car, now."

She ran out to take it. Neale stood on the corner, cursing the whole race of tram-cars.

When it passed him, close to him in the narrow street, he caught sight of her face. It was bent downward as if to hide it from the other people in the car. He saw that there was a very faint smile on her lips as if she could not keep it back, a little sweet, secret, happy smile. Her whole face was softly shimmering with it.

Good heavens! why hadn't he gone on with her! He leaped forward and sprinted after the rapidly disappearing car.

And stopped short in the midst of the traffic. You can't make love in a street-car! What an imbecile he was!

Often, after she had left him, he pelted off into the Campagna, walking for miles "like a madman," said the leisurely Italian countrymen, slowly stepping about their work. Neale felt himself rather mad, as though the steady foundations of his life had been rent and shattered, as by a blast of dynamite.

Dynamite? What was it somebody had said to him once, about dynamite? He tried to think, but could not remember. Perhaps it was something he had read in a book.

Once, after such a headlong tramp, he came in and wrote a long letter to his mother, telling her all about Marise; a strange thing for him to do, he thought, as he dropped the letter in the box. But everything he did now seemed strange to him. Strange and yet irresistibly natural.