I don't know what I'm going on about rain and mud for, Chet darling, when it's you I'm thinking of. Nothing else and nobody else. Chet, I got a funny feeling there's something you're keeping back from me. You're hurt worse than just the leg. Boy, dear, don't you know it won't make any difference with me how you look, or feel, or anything? I don't care how bad you're smashed up. I'd rather have you without any features at all than any other man with two sets. Whatever's happened to the outside of you, they can't change your insides. And you're the same man that called out to me, that day, "Hoo-hoo! Hello, sweetheart!" and when I gave you a piece of my mind climbed down off the pole, and put your face up to be slapped, God bless the boy in you--
A sharp little sound from him. Miss Kate looked up, quickly. Chet Ball was staring at the beady-eyed yellow chicken in his hand.
"What's this thing?" he demanded in a strange voice.
Miss Kate answered him very quietly, trying to keep her own voice easy and natural. "That's a toy chicken, cut out of wood."
Chet Ball held it in his great hand and stared at it for a brief moment, struggling between anger and amusement. And between anger and amusement he put it down on the table none too gently and stoop up, yawning a little.
"That's a hell of a job for a he-man!" Then in utter contrition: "Oh, beggin' your pardon! That was fierce! I didn't--"
But there was nothing shocked about the expression on Miss Kate's face. She was registering joy--pure joy.
When you are twenty you do not patronize sunsets unless you are unhappy, in love, or both. Tessie Golden was both. Six months ago a sunset that Belasco himself could not have improved upon had wrung from her only a casual tribute such as: "My! Look how red the sky is!" delivered as unemotionally as a weather bulletin.
Tessie Golden sat on the top step of the back porch now, a slim, inert heap in a cotton kimono whose colour and design were libels on the Nipponese. Her head was propped wearily against the porch post. Her hands were limp in her lap. Her face was turned toward the west, where shone that mingling of orange and rose known as salmon pink. But no answering radiance in the girl's face met the glow in the Wisconsin sky.