Thompson had effected a sort of compromise with his principles when he
sought Carr. He had more or less consciously resolved to keep his
calling in the background, to suppress the evangelical tendency which
his training had made nearly second nature. This for the sake of
intelligent companionship. He was like a man sentenced to solitary
confinement. Even the temporary presence of a jailer is a boon to such,
a break in the ghastly solitude. But he was fast succumbing to a despair
of reaching across the barrier of this critical silence and he was about
to rise and leave when he happened to look about and see Sophie Carr
standing within arm's length, gazing at him with a peculiar intentness,
a mild look of surprise upon her vivid young face, a trace of
puzzlement.
A most amazing thing happened to Mr. Thompson. His heart leaped.
Perhaps it rarely happens that a normal, healthy man reaches a
comparative degree of maturity without experiencing a quickening of his
blood in the presence of a woman. Yet it cannot be gainsaid that it does
happen. It was so in Thompson's case. Staring into the clear pools of
Sophie Carr's gray eyes some strange quality of attraction in a woman
first dawned on him. Something that made him feel a passionate sense of
incompleteness.
He did not think this. The singular longing had flamed up like a beacon
within him. It had nothing to do with his mental processes. It was
purely an instinctive revelation. A blind man whose sight has been
restored, upon whose eager vision bursts suddenly all the bright beauty
of sun and sky and colorful landscape, could have been no more
bewildered than he. It was as if indeed he had been blind.
All the women he had ever known seemed pale and colorless beside this
girl standing near, her head a little aside as she looked at him. There
was not a detail of her that escaped him, that failed to make its
appeal, from the perfect oval of her face down to the small feet in
bead-ornamented moccasins. A woman's eyes, her hair, her hands, her
bearing--these things had never obtruded upon his notice before. Yet he
saw now that a shaft of sunlight on her hair made it shimmer like ripe
wheat straw, that her breast was full and rounded, her lips red and
sweetly curved. But it was not alone that swift revelation of seductive
beauty, or warm human desirableness, that stirred him so deeply, that
afflicted him with those queer uncomfortable sensations. He found
himself struggling with a sense of guilt, of shame. The world, the
flesh, and the devil seemed leagued against his peace of mind.
He was filled with an incredulous wonder as to what manner of thing this
was which had blown through the inner recesses of his being like a gusty
wind through an open door. He had grown to manhood with nothing but a
cold, passionless tolerance in his attitude toward women. Technically he
was aware of sex, advised as to its pitfalls and temptations; actually
he could grasp nothing of the sort. A very small child is incapable of
associating pain with a hot iron until the hot iron has burned him. Even
then he can scarcely correlate cause and effect. Neither could Thompson.
No woman had ever before stirred his pulse to an added beat.