Peter, you will have to watch that mouth of yours. It's an awfully betraying feature. So long as it's occupied with politics and the fads and the foibles and the sins and the foolishness and the extravagances of humanity, it's all very well. But if you ever get in trouble or if ever your heart hurts, or you get mad enough to kill somebody, that mouth of yours is going to be a most awfully revealing feature, Peter.
You will have hard work to settle it down into hard-and-fast noncommittal lines."Peter looked at the girl steadily.
"Have you specialized on my mouth?" he asked.
"Huh-umph!" said Linda, shaking her head vigorously. When Ispecialize I use a pin and a microscope and go right to the root of matters as I was taught. This is superficial. I am extemporizing now.""Well, if this is extemporizing," said Peter, "God help my soul if you ever go at me with a pin and a microscope.""Oh, but I won't!" cried Linda. "It wouldn't be kind to pin your friends on a setting board and use a microscope on them. You might see things that were strictly private. You might see things they wouldn't want you to see. They might not be your friends any more if you did that. When I make a friend I just take him on trust like I did Donald. You're my friend, aren't you, Peter?""Yes, Linda," said Peter soberly. "Put me to any test you can think of if you want proof.""But I don't believe in PROVING friends, either," said Linda. "Ibelieve in nurturing them. I would set a friend in my garden and water his feet and turn the sunshine on him and tell him to stay there and grow. I might fertilize him, I might prune him, and Imight use insecticide on him. I might spray him with rather stringent solutions, but I give you my word I would not test him.
If he flourished under my care I would know it, and if he did not I would know it, and that would be all I would want to know. Ihave watched Daddy search for the seat of nervous disorders, and sometimes he had to probe very deep to find what developed nerves unduly but he didn't ever do any picking and raveling and fringing at the soul of a human being merely for the sake of finding out what it was made of; and everyone says I am like him.""I wish I might have known him," said Peter.
"Don't I wish it!" said Linda. "Now then, Peter, go ahead. Read your article."Peter opened a packing case, picked out a sheaf of papers, and sitting opposite Linda, began to read. He was dumbfounded to find that he, a man who had read and talked extemporaneously before great bodies of learned men, should have cold feet and shaking hands and a hammering heart because he was trying to read an article on America for Americans before a high-school Junior.
But presently, as the theme engrossed him, he forgot the vision of Linda interesting herself in his homemaking, and saw instead a vision of his country threatened on one side by the red menace of the Bolshevik, on the other by the yellow menace of the Jap, and yet on another by the treachery of the Mexican and the slowly uprising might of the black man, and presently he was thundering his best-considered arguments at Linda until she imperceptibly drew back from him on the packing case, and with parted lips and wide eyes she listened in utter absorption. She gazed at a transformed Peter with aroused eyes and a white light of patriotism on his forehead, and a conception even keener than anything that the war had brought her young soul was burning in her heart of what a man means when he tries to express his feeling concerning the land of his birth. Presently, without realizing what she was doing, she reached for her pad and pencils and rapidly began sketching a stretch of peaceful countryside over which a coming storm of gigantic proportions was gathering.
Fired by Peter's article, the touch of genius in Linda's soul became creative and she fashioned huge storm clouds wind driven, that floated in such a manner as to bring the merest suggestion of menacing faces, black faces, yellow faces, brown faces, and under the flash of lightning, just at the obscuring of the sun, a huge, evil, leering red face. She swept a stroke across her sheet and below this she began again, sketching the same stretch of country she had pictured above, strolling in cultivated fields, dotting it with white cities, connecting it with smooth roadways, sweeping the sky with giant planes. At one side, winging in from the glow of morning, she drew in the strong-winged flight of a flock of sea swallows, peacefully homing toward the far-distant ocean. She was utterly unaware when Peter stopped reading. Absorbed, she bent over her work.
When she had finished she looked up.
"Now I'll take this home," she said. "I can't do well on color with pencils. You hold that article till I have time to put this on water-color paper and touch it up a bit here and there, and Ibelieve it will be worthy of starting and closing your article."She pushed the sketches toward him.
"You little wonder!" said Peter softly.
"Yes, 'little' is good," scoffed Linda, rising to very nearly his height and reaching for the lunch basket. " 'Little' is good, Peter. If I could do what I like to myself I would get in some kind of a press and squash down about seven inches.""Oh, Lord!" said Peter. "Forget it. What's the difference what the inches of your body are so long as your brain has a stature worthy of mention?""Good-bye!" said Linda. "On the strength of that I'll jazz that sketch all up, bluey and red-purple and jade-green. I 11 make it as glorious as a Catalina sunset."As she swung the car around the sharp curve at the boulders she looked back and laughingly waved her hand at Peter, and Peter experienced a wild desire to shriek lest she lose control of the car and plunge down the steep incline. A second later, when he saw her securely on the road below, he smiled to himself.
"Proves one thing," he said conclusively. "She is over the horrors. She is driving unconsciously. Thank God she knew that curve so well she could look the other way and drive it mentally.
