“Certainly, he’s going,” said Jennie, entering. “This is my meeting, Jim.” 67 67 “Surely, I’m going,” assented Jim. “And I think I’ll run along.” “I wish we had room for you in the car,” said the colonel. “But I’m going around by Bronson’s to pick up the speaker, and I’ll have a chuck-up load.” “Not so much of a load as you think,” said Jennie. “I’m going with Jim. The walk will do me good.” Any candidate warms to her voting population just before election; but Jennie had a special kindness for Jim. He was no longer a farm-hand. The fact that he was coming to be a center of disturbance in the district, and that she quite failed to understand how his eccentric behavior could be harmonized with those principles of teaching which she had imbibed at the state normal school in itself lifted him nearer to equality with her. A public nuisance is really more respectable than a nonentity. She gave Jim a thrill as she passed through the gate that he opened for her. White moonlight on her white furs suggested purity, exaltation, the essence of womanhood—things far 68 finer in the woman of twenty-seven than the glamour thrown over him by the schoolgirl of sixteen. 68 Jim gave her no thrill; for he looked gaunt and angular in his skimpy, ready-made suit, too short in legs and sleeves, and too thin for the season. Yet, as they walked along, Jim grew upon her. He strode on with immense strides, made slow to accommodate her shorter steps, and embarrassing her by his entire absence of effort to keep step. For all that, he lifted his face to the stars, and he kept silence, save for certain fragments of his thoughts, in dropping which he assumed that she, like himself, was filled with the grandeur of the sparkling sky, its vast moon, plowing like an astronomical liner through the cloudlets of a wool-pack. He pointed out the great open spaces in the Milky Way, wondering at their emptiness, and at the fact that no telescope can find stars in them. They stopped and looked. Jim laid his hard hands on the shoulders of her white fur collarette. “What’s the use of political meetings,” said Jim, “when you and I can stand here and think 69 our way out, even beyond the limits of our Universe?”
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