His thoughts were so turbulent that
Charity finally intruded.
"What's on your mind, Jim?"
"Oh, I was just thinking."
"What about?"
"Oh, things."
Suddenly he reached out and seized the hand that drooped at her knee
like a wilted lily. He wrung her fingers with a vigor that hurt her,
then he said, "Got any dogs to show this season?"
She laughed at the violent abruptness of this, and said, "I think
I'll give an orphan-show instead."
He shook his head in despairing admiration and leaned back to watch
the landscape at the window. So did she. On the windows their own
reflections were cast in transparent films of light. Each wraith
watched the other, seeming to read the mood and need no speech.
Dyckman's mind kept shuttling over and over the same rails of
thought, like a switch-engine eternally shunting cars from one track
to another. His very temples throbbed with the _clickety-click_
of the train. At last he groaned:
"This world's too much for me. It's got me guessing."
He seemed to be so impressed with his original and profound discovery
of life's unanswerable complexity that Charity smiled, the same sad,
sweet smile with which she pored on the book of sorrow or listened to
the questions of her orphans who asked where their fathers had gone.
She thought of Jim Dyckman as one of her orphans. There was a good
deal of the mother in her love of him. For she did love him. And she
would have married him if he had asked her earlier--before Peter
Cheever swept over her horizon and carried her away with his zest
and his magnificence.
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