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Heyl had told her that Lasker was always at his desk at eight. Now, Fanny Brandeis knew that the average young woman, standing outside the office of a man like Lasker, unknown and at the mercy of office boy or secretary, continues to stand outside until she leaves in discouragement. But Fanny knew, too, that she was not an average young woman.
His teeth came together with a sharp little crack. His face, in that second, was a comic mask, surprised, stunned, almost idiotic. Then he went down, as Clarence Heyl had predicted, limp. Not with a crash, but slowly, crumpingly, so that he almost dragged her with him. Fanny stood looking down at him a moment. Then she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
She told herself that when she came upon a flaming golden maple in October she was content to know it was a maple, and to warm her soul at its blaze. There had been something in the Chicago Herald, though oh, yes; it had spoken of him as the brilliant young naturalist, Clarence Heyl. He was to have gone on an expedition with Roosevelt. A sprained ankle, or some such thing, had prevented.
She sank down on the rough bench by the table, and the proud head came down on her arms so that there was a little clatter and tinkle among the supper things spread on the table. Then quiet. Clarence Heyl stared. He stared, helplessly, as does a man who has never, in all his life, been called upon to comfort a woman in tears. Then instinct came to his rescue. It rested there quite naturally.
Fanny sat up, helloing shrilly, hysterically. She got to her feet, staggeringly. And Clarence Heyl walked toward her. "You ought to be spanked for this," he said. Fanny began to cry weakly. She felt no curiosity as to his being there. She wasn't at all sure that he actually was there, for that matter. At that thought she dug a frantic hand into his arm.
Fanny put up her hand. "Is there?" "Why, you must have felt it. How did you get it?" Fanny said nothing. "I'll bet she was fighting," said Theodore with the intuitive knowledge that one child has of another's ways. "Fanny!" The keen brown eyes were upon her. "Some boys were picking on Clarence Heyl, and it made me mad. They called him names." "What names?" "Oh, names."
But you get me. Not that he knows it, or shows it. Heyl, I mean. Lord, no! But he's got something something kind of spiritual in him that makes you that way, too. He doesn't say much, either. That's the funny part of it. I do all the talking, seems, when I'm with him. But I find myself saying things I didn't know I knew. He makes you think about things you're afraid to face by yourself.
She crumpled it in the other hand, and substituted her handkerchief. Heyl still stood, hat in hand, motionless. "Why don't you wave good-by?" she called, though he could not possibly hear. "Wave good-by!" And then the hand with the handkerchief went to her face, and she was weeping. I think it was that old drama-thrill in her, dormant for so long.
"Look at me," said Heyl. So she tried to lift them again, bravely, and could not. At that he bent his head and kissed Fanny Brandeis in the way a woman wants to be kissed for the first time by the man she loves. It hurt her lips, that kiss, and her teeth, and the back of her neck, and it left her breathless, and set things whirling.
Clarence Heyl, whose very existence you will have failed to remember, used to hover about her uncertainly, always looking as if he would like to walk home with her, but never summoning the courage to do it. They were graduated from the grammar school together, and Clarence solemnly read a graduation essay entitled "Where is the Horse?"
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