Chapter 20

CHAPTER XX--A MAN-TALK

The most patient man in the world is prone to impatience in love--
and Sheldon was in love. He called himself an ass a score of times
a day, and strove to contain himself by directing his mind in other
channels, but more than a score of times each day his thoughts
roved back and dwelt on Joan. It was a pretty problem she
presented, and he was continually debating with himself as to what
was the best way to approach her.

He was not an adept at love-making. He had had but one experience
in the gentle art (in which he had been more wooed than wooing),
and the affair had profited him little. This was another affair,
and he assured himself continually that it was a uniquely different
and difficult affair. Not only was here a woman who was not bent
on finding a husband, but it was a woman who wasn't a woman at all;
who was genuinely appalled by the thought of a husband; who joyed
in boys' games, and sentimentalized over such things as adventure;
who was healthy and normal and wholesome, and who was so immature
that a husband stood for nothing more than an encumbrance in her
cherished scheme of existence.

But how to approach her? He divined the fanatical love of freedom
in her, the deep-seated antipathy for restraint of any sort. No
man could ever put his arm around her and win her. She would
flutter away like a frightened bird. Approach by contact--that, he
realized, was the one thing he must never do. His hand-clasp must
be what it had always been, the hand-clasp of hearty friendship and
nothing more. Never by action must he advertise his feeling for
her. Remained speech. But what speech? Appeal to her love? But
she did not love him. Appeal to her brain? But it was apparently
a boy's brain. All the deliciousness and fineness of a finely bred
woman was hers; but, for all he could discern, her mental processes
were sexless and boyish. And yet speech it must be, for a
beginning had to be made somewhere, some time; her mind must be
made accustomed to the idea, her thoughts turned upon the matter of
marriage.

And so he rode overseeing about the plantation, with tightly drawn
and puckered brows, puzzling over the problem, and steeling himself
to the first attempt. A dozen ways he planned an intricate leading
up to the first breaking of the ice, and each time some link in the
chain snapped and the talk went off on unexpected and irrelevant
lines. And then one morning, quite fortuitously, the opportunity
came.

"My dearest wish is the success of Berande," Joan had just said,
apropos of a discussion about the cheapening of freights on copra
to market.

"Do you mind if I tell you the dearest wish of my heart?" he
promptly returned. "I long for