Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/91

 were not in a position to buy a dozen for yourself. But I didn't argue the point; she was being too sweet and direct. She wasn't even making the mistake of proposing to me, though the last time it happened, rather flippantly, during the Christmas vacation, she said she wouldn't take my No as final.

"Her father, she went on to tell me, would have offered me a job, only he had a proud feeling that I would scorn his sort of life, and it would seem rather an 'anachronism' for me to be making rubber roofing. I called her Rhoda Malaprop which didn't phase her at all. She said she had come across anachronism in a new novel and had been waiting all day for a chance to use it and couldn't wait any longer.

"There were such oceans of kindness all about me, warm buoyant oceans, that something in me got unstranded and floated free. Old hurts had been massaged into memories; the future was a nightmare I'd had from eating too much poetry; the present was real and warm and sufficient. There I was walking hand in hand with the person I've known the longest, contented, grateful, uncritical, unresisting, just there. Suddenly, I don't know why, I had to stop and kiss Rhoda. I couldn't not have! And that was odd, because it wasn't an arrival or a departure or a birthday or anything. Moreover, it wasn't that kind of kiss; it was the other kind—head-on collision. I've often surprised myself, but this was a real shock.

"It took her all of a heap too. She went limp and