Page:Elmer Gantry (1927).djvu/115

 "No, I'm not!"

"I dare you!"

"Well—Elmer, then! So there now!"

They laughed intimately, and in the stress of their merriment he picked up her hand, squeezed it, rubbed it against his arm. He did not release it, but it was only with the friendliest and least emphatic pressure that he held it while he crooned:

"You aren't really scared of poor old Elmer?"

"Yes, I am, a tiny bit!"

"But why?"

"Oh, you're big and strong and dignified, like you were lots older, and you have such a boom-boom voice—my, I love to listen to it, but it scares me—I feel like you'd turn on me and say, 'You bad little girl,' and then I'd have to 'fess. My! And then you're so terribly educated—you know such long words, and you can explain all these things about the Bible that I never can understand. And of course you are a real ordained Baptist clergyman."

"Um, uh— But does that keep me from being a man, too?"

"Yes, it does! Sort of!"

Then there was no playfulness, but a grim urgency in his voice:

"Then you couldn't imagine me kissing you? . . . Look at me! . . . Look at me, I tell you! . . . There! . . . No, don't look away now. Why, you're blushing! You dear, poor, darling kid! You can imagine me kissing—"

"Well, I oughtn't to!"

Shamed?"

"Yes, I am!"

"Listen, dear. You think of me as so awfully grown-up, and of course I have to impress all these folks when I'm in the pulpit, but you can see through it and— I'm really just a big bashful kid, and I need your help so. Do you know, dear, you remind me of my mother—"

Frank Shallard turned on Elmer in their bedroom, while they were washing for supper—their first moment alone since Lulu and Miss Baldwin had driven them to the Bains farm to spend the night before the Thanksgiving service.