The Third Violet STEPHEN CRANE CHAPTER 13 pptx

The Third Violet
STEPHEN CRANE

CHAPTER 13

One day Hollanden said, in greeting, to Hawker, "Well, he's gone."
"Who?" asked Hawker.
"Why, Oglethorpe, of course. Who did you think I meant?"
"How did I know?" said Hawker angrily.
"Well," retorted Hollanden, "your chief interest was in his movements, I
thought."
"Why, of course not, hang you! Why should I be interested in his movements?"
"Well, you weren't, then. Does that suit you?"
After a period of silence Hawker asked, "What did he what made him go?"
"Who?"
"Why Oglethorpe."
"How was I to know you meant him? Well, he went because some important
business affairs in New York demanded it, he said; but he is coming back again
in a week. They had rather a late interview on the porch last evening."
"Indeed," said Hawker stiffly.
"Yes, and he went away this morning looking particularly elated. Aren't you
glad?"
"I don't see how it concerns me," said Hawker, with still greater stiffness.
In a walk to the lake that afternoon Hawker and Miss Fanhall found themselves
side by side and silent. The girl contemplated the distant purple hills as if
Hawker were not at her side and silent. Hawker frowned at the roadway.
Stanley, the setter, scouted the fields in a genial gallop.
At last the girl turned to him. "Seems to me," she said, "seems to me you are
dreadfully quiet this afternoon."
"I am thinking about my wretched field of stubble," he answered, still frowning.
Her parasol swung about until the girl was looking up at his inscrutable profile.

"Is it, then, so important that you haven't time to talk to me?" she asked with an
air of what might have been timidity.
A smile swept the scowl from his face. "No, indeed," he said, instantly;
"nothing is so important as that."
She seemed aggrieved then. "Hum you didn't look so," she told him.
"Well, I didn't mean to look any other way," he said contritely. "You know what
a bear I am sometimes. Hollanden says it is a fixed scowl from trying to see
uproarious pinks, yellows, and blues."
A little brook, a brawling, ruffianly little brook, swaggered from side to side
down the glade, swirling in white leaps over the great dark rocks and shouting
challenge to the hillsides. Hollanden and the Worcester girls had halted in a
place of ferns and wet moss. Their voices could be heard quarrelling above the
clamour of the stream. Stanley, the setter, had sousled himself in a pool and then
gone and rolled in the dust of the road. He blissfully lolled there, with his coat
now resembling an old door mat.
"Don't you think Jem is a wonderfully good fellow?" said the girl to the painter.
"Why, yes, of course," said Hawker.
"Well, he is," she retorted, suddenly defensive.
"Of course," he repeated loudly.
She said, "Well, I don't think you like him as well as I like him."
"Certainly not," said Hawker.
"You don't?" She looked at him in a kind of astonishment.
"Certainly not," said Hawker again, and very irritably. "How in the wide world
do you expect me to like him as well as you like him?"
"I don't mean as well," she explained.
"Oh!" said Hawker.
"But I mean you don't like him the way I do at all the way I expected you to
like him. I thought men of a certain pattern always fancied their kind of men
wherever they met them, don't you know? And I was so sure you and Jem
would be friends."

"Oh!" cried Hawker. Presently he added, "But he isn't my kind of a man at all."
"He is. Jem is one of the best fellows in the world."
Again Hawker cried "Oh!"
They paused and looked down at the brook. Stanley sprawled panting in the
dust and watched them. Hawker leaned against a hemlock. He sighed and
frowned, and then finally coughed with great resolution. "I suppose, of course,
that I am unjust to him. I care for you myself, you understand, and so it
becomes "
He paused for a moment because he heard a rustling of her skirts as if she had
moved suddenly. Then he continued: "And so it becomes difficult for me to be
fair to him. I am not able to see him with a true eye." He bitterly addressed the
trees on the opposite side of the glen. "Oh, I care for you, of course. You might
have expected it." He turned from the trees and strode toward the roadway. The
uninformed and disreputable Stanley arose and wagged his tail.
As if the girl had cried out at a calamity, Hawker said again, "Well, you might
have expected it."