He gave her a hand to rise.  “If you don’t mind.  I think a fellow is awful if a lady goes on a walk with him and she can’t trust him and he tries to flirt with her and all.”

“I’m sure you’re highly trustworthy!” she snapped, and she sprang up without his aid.  Then, smiling excessively, “Uh—­don’t you think Carol sometimes fails to appreciate Dr. Will’s ability?”

III

Ray habitually asked her about his window-trimming, the display of the new shoes, the best music for the entertainment at the Eastern Star, and (though he was recognized as a professional authority on what the town called “gents’ furnishings”) about his own clothes.  She persuaded him not to wear the small bow ties which made him look like an elongated Sunday School scholar.  Once she burst out: 

“Ray, I could shake you!  Do you know you’re too apologetic?  You always appreciate other people too much.  You fuss over Carol Kennicott when she has some crazy theory that we all ought to turn anarchists or live on figs and nuts or something.  And you listen when Harry Haydock tries to show off and talk about turnovers and credits and things you know lots better than he does.  Look folks in the eye!  Glare at ’em!  Talk deep!  You’re the smartest man in town, if you only knew it.  You are!”

He could not believe it.  He kept coming back to her for confirmation.  He practised glaring and talking deep, but he circuitously hinted to Vida that when he had tried to look Harry Haydock in the eye, Harry had inquired, “What’s the matter with you, Raymie?  Got a pain?” But afterward Harry had asked about Kantbeatum socks in a manner which, Ray felt, was somehow different from his former condescension.

They were sitting on the squat yellow satin settee in the boarding-house parlor.  As Ray reannounced that he simply wouldn’t stand it many more years if Harry didn’t give him a partnership, his gesticulating hand touched Vida’s shoulders.

“Oh, excuse me!” he pleaded.

“It’s all right.  Well, I think I must be running up to my room.  Headache,” she said briefly.

IV

Ray and she had stopped in at Dyer’s for a hot chocolate on their way home from the movies, that March evening.  Vida speculated, “Do you know that I may not be here next year?”

“What do you mean?”

With her fragile narrow nails she smoothed the glass slab which formed the top of the round table at which they sat.  She peeped through the glass at the perfume-boxes of black and gold and citron in the hollow table.  She looked about at shelves of red rubber water-bottles, pale yellow sponges, wash-rags with blue borders, hair-brushes of polished cherry backs.  She shook her head like a nervous medium coming out of a trance, stared at him unhappily, demanded: 

“Why should I stay here?  And I must make up my mind.  Now.  Time to renew our teaching-contracts for next year.  I think I’ll go teach in some other town.  Everybody here is tired of me.  I might as well go.  Before folks come out and say they’re tired of me.  I have to decide tonight.  I might as well——­Oh, no matter.  Come.  Let’s skip.  It’s late.”