Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/119

 following in the furrow a plough. Lumbermen in winter with upturned sheepskin collars, heavy figures wrapped in frozen breath. Sweating men in midsummer, hoeing corn, loading hay wains, men early in the morning crying 'Co' boss' to the cows. She did not think of Augustus or the other students. Only of the men she had never known. The bestial but eyeless bronze boxer in the stereoscope suddenly leaped out of the blackness at her. All his bulging muscles seen in perspective. And suddenly she thought of Anthony Jones and a warm tide rose somewhere within her, swept up and almost drowned her. Anthony was at once all the men whom she had ever seen walking far off calling to their beasts. If this is love, if this ghastly feeling of suffocation...Her sigh quavered and broke. She wanted to cry. But the story was not quite done, and there by the portiere was her friend, Sears Ripley. Why did he come in to see her so often? Of course he had to finish the arrangements with Mr. Fox for Anthony's great book, but he always stopped in her office and looked at her consideringly. Perhaps he had known that she would fall in love with Captain Jones, if that was really what she had done. She felt no shame in his presence. She could have told him all about the brief scene in Miss Bigley's parlor after the lecture. Suddenly she realized that if she ever wanted to she could even tell him how, long, long ago, Mr. Matthews of New York had mistaken her for her mother.