T. Tembarom by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Author:Frances Hodgson Burnett [Burnett, Frances Hodgson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: City and town life -- Fiction, Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
Published: 2001-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

Her amazement would indeed have been great if she had been told that she secretly shared his feeling.

"It seems as if somehow you had never been dull," was her method of expressing it.

"Dull! Holy cats! no," he grinned. "There wasn't any time for being anything. You just had to keep going."

She became in time familiar with Mrs. Bowse's boarding-house and boarders. She knew Mrs. Peck and Mr. Jakes and the young lady from the notion counter (those wonderful shops!). Julius and Jem and the hall bedroom and the tilted chairs and cloud of smoke she saw so often that she felt at home with them.

"Poor Mrs. Bowse," she said, "must have been a most respectable, motherly, hard-working creature. Really a nice person of her class." She could not quite visualize the "parlor," but it must have been warm and comfortable. And the pianola—a piano which you could play without even knowing your notes—What a clever invention! America seemed full of the most wonderfully clever things.

Tembarom was actually uplifted in soul when he discovered that she laid transparent little plans for leading him into talk about New York. She wanted him to talk about it, and the Lord knows he wanted to talk about himself. He had been afraid at first. She might have hated it, as Palford did, and it would have hurt him somehow if she hadn't understood. But she did. Without quite realizing the fact, she was beginning to love it, to wish she had seen it. Her Somerset vicarage imagination did not allow of such leaps as would be implied by the daring wish that sometime she might see it.

But Tembarom's imagination was more athletic.

"Jinks! wouldn't it be fine to take her there! The lark in London wouldn't be ace high to it."

The Hutchinsons were not New Yorkers, but they had been part of the atmosphere of Mrs. Bowse's. Mr. Hutchinson would of course be rather a forward and pushing man to be obliged to meet, but Little Ann! She did so like Little Ann! And the dear boy did so want, in his heart of hearts, to talk about her at times. She did not know whether, in the circumstances, she ought to encourage him; but he was so dear, and looked so much dearer when he even said "Little Ann," that she could not help occasionally leading him gently toward the subject.

When he opened the newspapers and found the advertisements of the flats, she saw the engaging, half-awkward humorousness come into his eyes.

"Here's one that would do all right," he said—"four rooms and a bath, eleventh floor, thirty-five dollars a month."

He spread the newspaper on the table and rested on his elbow, gazing at it for a few minutes wholly absorbed. Then he looked up at her and smiled.

"There's a plan of the rooms," he said. "Would you like to look at it? Shall I bring your chair up to the table while we go over it together?"

He brought the chair, and side by side they went over it thoroughly.

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