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time to think that makes me blue. You see, Enid, I've never yet done anything that gave me any satisfaction. I
must be good for something. When I lie still and think, I wonder whether my life has been happening to me or
to somebody else. It doesn't seem to have much connection with me. I haven't made much of a start."
"But you are not twenty-two yet. You have plenty of time to start. Is that what you are thinking about all the
time!" She shook her finger at him.
"I think about two things all the time. That is one of them." Mrs. Wheeler came in with Claude's four o'clock
milk; it was his first day downstairs.
When they were children, playing by the mill-dam, Claude had seen the future as a luminous vagueness in
which he and Enid would always do things together. Then there came a time when he wanted to do everything
with Ernest, when girls were disturbing and a bother, and he pushed all that into the distance, knowing that
some day he must reckon with it again.
Now he told himself he had always known Enid would come back; and she had come on that afternoon when
she entered his drug-smelling room and let in the sunlight. She would have done that for nobody but him. She
was not a girl who would depart lightly from conventions that she recognized as authoritative. He
One of Ours 60
remembered her as she used to march up to the platform for Children's Day exercises with the other little girls
of the infant class; in her stiff white dress, never a curl awry or a wrinkle in her stocking, keeping her little
comrades in order by the acquiescent gravity of her face, which seemed to say, "How pleasant it is to do thus
and to do Right!"
Old Mr. Smith was the minister in those days,--a good man who had been much tossed about by a stormy and
temperamental wife--and his eyes used to rest yearningly upon little Enid Royce, seeing in her the promise of
"virtuous and comely Christian womanhood," to use one of his own phrases. Claude, in the boys' class across
the aisle, used to tease her and try to distract her, but he respected her seriousness.
When they played together she was fair-minded, didn't whine if she got hurt, and never claimed a girl's
exemption from anything unpleasant. She was calm, even on the day when she fell into the mill-dam and he
fished her out; as soon as she stopped choking and coughing up muddy water, she wiped her face with her
little drenched petticoats, and sat shivering and saying over and over, "Oh, Claude, Claude!" Incidents like
that one now seemed to him significant and fateful.
When Claude's strength began to return to him, it came overwhelmingly. His blood seemed to grow strong
while his body was still weak, so that the in-rush of vitality shook him. The desire to live again sang in his
veins while his frame was unsteady. Waves of youth swept over him and left him exhausted. When Enid was
with him these feelings were never so strong; her actual presence restored his equilibrium--almost. This fact
did not perplex him; he fondly attributed it to something beautiful in the girl's nature,--a quality so lovely and
subtle that there is no name for it.
During the first days of his recovery he did nothing but enjoy the creeping stir of life. Respiration was a soft
physical pleasure. In the nights, so long he could not sleep them through, it was delightful to lie upon a cloud
that floated lazily down the sky. In the depths of this lassitude the thought of Enid would start up like a sweet,
burning pain, and he would drift out into the darkness upon sensations he could neither prevent nor control.
So long as he could plough, pitch hay, or break his back in the wheatfield, he had been master; but now he
was overtaken by himself. Enid was meant for him and she had come for him; he would never let her go. She
should never know how much he longed for her. She would be slow to feel even a little of what he was
feeling; he knew that. It would take a long while. But he would be infinitely patient, infinitely tender of her. It
should be he who suffered, not she. Even in his dreams he never wakened her, but loved her while she was
still and unconscious like a statue. He would shed love upon her until she warmed and changed without
knowing why.
Sometimes when Enid sat unsuspecting beside him, a quick blush swept across his face and he felt guilty
toward her, meek and humble, as if he must beg her forgiveness for something. Often he was glad when she
went away and left him alone to think about her. Her presence brought him sanity, and for that he ought to be
grateful. When he was with her, he thought how she was to be the one who would put him right with the
world and make him fit into the life about him. He had troubled his mother and disappointed his father, His
marriage would be the first natural, dutiful, expected thing he had ever done. It would be the beginning of
usefulness and content; as his mother's oft-repeated Psalm said, it would restore his soul. Enid's willingness to
listen to him he could scarcely doubt. Her devotion to him during his illness was probably regarded by her
friends as equivalent to an engagement.
V
Claude's first trip to Frankfort was to get his hair cut. After leaving the barber-shop he presented himself,
glistening with bayrum, at Jason Royce's office. Mr. Royce, in the act of closing his safe, turned and took the
young man by the hand.
One of Ours 61
"Hello, Claude, glad to see you around again! Sickness can't do much to a husky young farmer like you. With
old fellows, it's another story. I'm just starting off to have a look at my alfalfa, south of the river. Get in and go
along with me."
They went out to the open car that stood by the sidewalk, and when they were spinning along between fields
of ripening grain Claude broke the silence. "I expect you know what I want to see you about, Mr. Royce?"
The older man shook his head. He had been preoccupied and grim ever since they started.
"Well," Claude went on modestly, "it oughtn't to surprise you to hear that I've set my heart on Enid. I haven't
said anything to her yet, but if you're not against me, I'm going to try to persuade her to marry me."
"Marriage is a final sort of thing, Claude," said Mr. Royce. He sat slumping in his seat, watching the road
ahead of him with intense abstraction, looking more gloomy and grizzled than usual. "Enid is a vegetarian,
you know," he remarked unexpectedly.
Claude smiled. "That could hardly make any difference to me, Mr. Royce."
The other nodded slightly. "I know. At your age you think it doesn't. Such things do make a difference,
however." His lips closed over his half-dead cigar, and for some time he did not open them.
"Enid is a good girl," he said at last. "Strictly speaking, she has more brains than a girl needs. If Mrs. Royce
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