Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/281

270 go striding home along the road without any limp, you have your dinner and are able to thumb your guitar, and you spend a pleasant evening thinking about the girl in the pink organdie who fell in love with you while she was putting on a bandage—for that's what a man always thinks of any woman who does anything for him, is n't it?"

"I'm afraid you're cynical," Floyd answered.

"Not of the girl with the light touch, anyway," Marion said. "For, see what she's done; she's healed your thumb and sent you home in high spirits and made you happy for the rest of the day—and without any such selfish motive as that of love, which you, in a man's egotistical way, are beginning to impute to her, and just because, being a cheerful soul with a light touch, she could n't help it. And the light touch is the same useful thing when applied to mental troubles as to sore thumbs."

"I am quite sure of it," said Floyd.

"Then, do you see why girls with the light touch are the most useful as well as the nicest?"

Floyd rose to go. "I should indeed be stupid," he said, "if I did not see—in the face of two such lessons."

"Two?" She looked at him, puzzled.

"Two." He held out his hand.

Her cheerful laugh of comprehension followed him as he left the room.

He went away, conscious of a distinct improvement in his spirits. He allowed his mind, usually curbed and bitted for the most cautious and conventional processes, to take one of those random, daring leaps, which its real vitality, chafing under such close control, sometimes demanded. It put him with a startling suddenness into a fascinated, half-alarmed contemplation of marriage. Perhaps, if one could but present an open mind towards women, one would discover that not all one's capacity for love had been exhausted upon a vain object.

It occurred to Floyd that it might at least be a healthy mental attitude, provided one could assume it. If one