Under the Skylights | Page 5

like his books; and the part
in his smoothly plastered black hair scarcely reached to her eyebrows.
She felt herself swelling, distending, filling her place to repletion, to
suffocation, and rose to flee. She was for seeking refuge in the brown
beard of Stephen Giles, which was at least on a level with her own chin,
when suddenly she perceived, in a dark corner of the place, a tower of
strength more promising still--a man even taller, broader, bulkier than
herself, a grand figure that might serve to reduce her to more desirable
proportions.
"Who is he?" she asked Giles, as she seized him by the elbow. "Take
me over there at once."
Giles laughed. "Why, that's Joyce," he said. "He's got so that he looks
in on us now and then."
"Joyce? What Joyce?"
"Why, Joyce. The one, the only,--as we believe."
"Abner Joyce? This Weary World? The Rod of the Oppressor?"

"Exactly. Let me bring him over and present him."
"Whichever you like; arrange it between Mohammed and the Mountain
just as you please." She looked over her shoulder; little Bond was
following. "Waive all ceremony," she begged. "I will go to him."
Giles trundled her over toward the dusky canopy under which Abner
stood chafing, conscious at once of his own powers and of his own
social inexpertness. In particular had he looked out with bitterness upon
the airy circulations of Adrian Bond--Adrian who smirked here and
nodded there and chaffed a bit now and then with the blonde Clytie and
openly philandered over the tea-urn with the brunette Medora. "That
snip! That water-fly! That whipper-snapper! That----"
Abner turned with a start. A worldly person, clad voluminously in furs,
was extending a hand that sparkled with many rings and was
composing a pair of smiling lips to say the pleasant thing. This
attention was startlingly, embarrassingly sudden, but it was welcome
and it was appropriate. Abner was little able to realize the quality of
aggressive homage that resided in Mrs. Pence's resolute and
unconventional advance, but it was natural enough that this showy
woman should wish to manifest her appreciation of a gifted and rising
author. He took her hand with a graceless gravity.
Mrs. Pence, upon a nearer view, found Abner all she had hoped.
Confronted by his stalwart limbs and expansive shoulders, she was no
longer a behemoth,--she felt almost like a sylph. She looked up frankly,
and with a sense of growing comfort, into his broad face where a good
strong growth of chestnut beard was bursting through his ruddy cheeks
and swirling abundantly beneath his nose. She looked up higher, to his
wide forehead, where a big shock of confident hair rolled and tumbled
about with careless affluence. And with no great shyness she appraised
his hands and his feet--those strong forceful hands that had dominated
the lurching, self-willed plough, those sturdy feet that had resolutely
tramped the miles of humpy furrow the ploughshare had turned up
blackly to sun and air. She shrank. She dwindled. Her slender
girlhood--that remote, incredible time--was on her once more.

"I shall never feel large again," she said.
How right she was! Nobody ever felt large for long when Abner Joyce
happened to be about.

V
Abner regarded Mrs. Pence and her magnificence with a sombre
intensity, far from ready to approve. He knew far more about her than
she could know about him--thanks to the activities of a shamefully
discriminating (or undiscriminating) press--and he was by no means
prepared to give her his countenance. Face to face with her opulence
and splendour he set the figure of his own mother--that sweet, patient,
plaintive little presence, now docilely habituated, at the closing in of a
long pinched life, to unremitting daily toil still unrewarded by ease and
comfort or by any hope or promise or prospect of it. There was his
father too--that good gray elder who had done so much faithful work,
yet had so little to show for it, who had fished all day and had caught
next to nothing, who had given four years out of his young life to the
fight for freedom only to see the reward so shamefully fall elsewhere....
Abner evoked here a fanciful figure of Palmer Pence himself, whom he
knew in a general way to be high up in some monstrous Trust. He saw
a prosperous, domineering man who with a single turn of the hand had
swept together a hundred little enterprises and at the same time had
swept out a thousand of the lesser fry into the wide spaces of empty
ruin, and who had insolently settled down beside his new machine to
catch the rain of coins minted for him from the wrongs of an injured
and insulted people....
Abner accepted in awkward silence Mrs. Pence's