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So Walter Babson found himself at twenty-one an outcast. He declaimed though no one would believe him that all the gentle souls he had ever encountered were weak; all the virile souls vicious or suspicious. He drifted. He doubted himself, and all the more noisily asserted his talent and the injustice of the world. He looked clean and energetic and desirous, but he had nothing on which to focus.
When Babson got through charging a jury the latter had always in fact been instructed in brutal and sneering tones to convict the defendant or forever after to regard themselves as disloyal citizens, oath violators and outcasts though the stenographic record of his remarks would have led the reader thereof to suppose that this same judge was a conscientious, tender-hearted merciful lover of humanity, whose sensitive soul quivered at the mere thought of a prison cell, and who meticulously sought to surround the defendant with every protection the law could interpose against the imputation of guilt.
"We find the defendant not guilty," repeated Mr. Walsh stubbornly. "I demand that the jury be polled!" cried the crestfallen O'Brien, his face crimson. And then the twelve reiterated severally that that was their verdict and that they hearkened unto it as it stood recorded and that they were entirely satisfied with it. "You are discharged!" said Babson in icy tones.
They seated themselves, a merry, laughing row, upon the wall; the Babson girls, Dot and Jack Marvin, Jotham, the Langham twins, Reuben Jenks, Mollie Wilson, Phoebe Small and even Sandy McLeod's little Janie, and gaily they chattered, the petals of the apple-blossoms falling about them, a perfumed shower.
I don't know whether you are ever going to do anything with your fire, but you do have it, Mr. Babson!" "I'll probably get fired with it.... Say, do you read Omar?"
But she forgot the sweetness of the vision in scorn of herself for even thinking of marriage with a weakling; scorn of herself for aspiring to marry a man who regarded her as only a dull stenographer; and a maternal anxiety over him that was untouched by passion. Babson returned to the office, immaculate, a thin, fiery soul.
He took off his eye-glasses to wipe them and tied his thin legs in a knot, and all the while said, "Yes, there's certainly a great deal to that." At a quarter to ten Mrs. Golden rose, indulged in a little kitten yawn behind her silvery hand, and said: "Well, I think I must be off to bed.... I find these May days so languid. Don't you, Mr. Babson? Spring fever.
Una and her mother had again spent a week of June in Panama, and she now recalled the bright, free mornings and lingering, wonderful twilights. She had no place to go this holiday afternoon, and she longed to join a noisy, excited party. Of Walter Babson she did not think. She stubbornly determined to snatch this time of freedom.
We was going to Boston to my Randy, and we're 'most to the cars, but we're just resting a little while first." To Uncle Joshua Babson, little Hi looked for pardon for this latest prank. "I wasn't naughty this time," he said, "I knew the way to Boston, and Prue felt so lonesome 'thout Randy that I was goin' ter take her there."
All the while she felt herself in touch with large affairs an article by the Governor of the State; these very sheets that she was typing to go to famous newspapers, to the "thundering presses" of which she had read in fiction; urgency, affairs, and doing something for Walter Babson. She was still typing swiftly at five-thirty, the closing hour.
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