416
PARTISAN REVIEW
Oh, the big fake!
she was thinking, with all his fake hemming
and hawing and stammering. Did he think she didn't see through
him? Did he take her for a fool? What kind of fool girls were de–
ceived by him and led off into the dark where he seized them and
practiced some shameful thing on them that made them cry out?
Well, she'd show him!
But she heard herself saying, as calm as the evening sky: "Why,
Mr. Harrick, I'd love to see it."
He was hanging on to that sad unexpectant expression on
his
face as long .as possible, she was sure of that, just to let her see the
innocent joy slowly dawn there. "Would you, really?" he was say–
ing. "Would you, Miss Hornby?"
"Of course, I would," she said briskly, eyeing him as though
he were in the Third Grade. "For I didn't see it either, when it first
came out, you see, my mother thought I was too young." Then she
added, with even more cheerful malice: "I'd love to go if old Mrs.
Blunden's old, old mother is really going. And if asking me is what
you had in mind with all that hemming and hawing."
"Lady," he said, grinning, "that was what had crossed my
mind."
"Don't think I don't see through you," she said, in her newly–
acquired school-room air of having caught out the culprit who threw
the spit-ball.
"Lady," he said, soberly, "I promise you one thing. I promise
you I don't see through you."
She was so startled, she couldn't reply.
"Lady," he said, and as he stared down into her face she saw
his head outlined against the pink-paling sky of evening, "I bet if
I threw a rock down your well, I'd be listening down in the dark
a long time before it hit water."
* *
*
The Sixth Grade teacher, Miss Abernathy, was waiting up for her
when she got in from Knoxville, well after midnight. She had not
told Miss Abernathy where, or with whom, she was going, but Miss
Abernathy, she was sure, had her own sources of information and had
been on the wire before the sound of the strange car had died away
from her front gate. "You've been to Knoxville," Miss Abernathy
announced.
