He not only taught her to manipulate the type-writer, but put
her through an elementary course of stenography as well.
"Certainly you can learn it," he said sternly at her first sign of
discouragement. "I got that far in my second lesson. Haven't you got
any brains?"
Nance by this time was not at all sure she had, but she was not going to
let Ike know it. Stung by his smug superiority, she often sat up far into
the night, wrestling with the arbitrary signs until Uncle Jed, seeing her
light under the door, would pound on the wall for her to go to bed.
She saw little of Dan Lewis these days. The weather no longer permitted
them to meet in Post-Office Square, and conditions even less inviting
kept them from trying to see each other in Snawdor's kitchen. Sometimes
she would wait at the corner for him to come home, but this had its
disadvantages, for there was always a crowd of loafers hanging about Slap
Jack's, and now that Nance was too old to stick out her tongue and call
names, she found her power of repartee seriously interfered with.
"I ain't coming up here to meet you any more," she declared to Dan on one
of these occasions. "I don't see why we can't go to Gorman's Chili Parlor
of an evening and set down and talk to each other, right."
"Gorman's ain't a nice place," insisted Dan. "I wish you'd come on up to
some of the church meetings with me. I could take you lots of times if
you'd go."
But Nance refused persistently to be inveigled into the religious fold.
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