and skilful and velvet-gloved as a girl with her beau. The proof of it
is that Tyler had never known he was being handled. Some folks in
Marvin, Texas, said she actually flirted with him, and they were almost
justified. Certainly the way she glanced up at him from beneath her
lashes was excused only by the way she scolded him if he tracked up the
kitchen floor. But then, Stella Kamps and her boy were different,
anyway. Marvin folks all agreed about that. Flowers on the table at
meals. Sitting over the supper things talking and laughing for an hour
after they'd finished eating, as if they hadn't seen each other in
years. Reading out loud to each other, out of books and then going on
like mad about what they'd just read, and getting all het up about it.
And sometimes chasing each other around the yard, spring evenings, like
a couple of fool kids. Honestly, if a body didn't know Stella Kamps so
well, and what a fight she had put up to earn a living for herself and
the boy after that good-for-nothing Kamps up and left her, and what a
housekeeper she was, and all, a person'd think--well--

So, then, Tyler had expected to miss her first of all. The way she
talked. The way she fussed around him without in the least seeming to
fuss. Her special way of cooking things. Her laugh which drew laughter
in its wake. The funny way she had of saying things, vitalising
commonplaces with the spark of her own electricity.

And now he missed her only as the average boy of twenty-one misses the
mother he has been used to all his life. No more and no less. Which
would indicate that Stella Kamps, in her protean endeavours, had
overplayed the parts just a trifle.

He had expected to miss the boys at the bank. He had expected to miss
the Mandolin Club. The Mandolin Club met, officially, every Thursday and
spangled the Texas night with their tinkling. Five rather dreamy-eyed
adolescents slumped in stoop-shouldered comfort over the instruments
cradled in their arms, each right leg crossed limply over the left, each
great foot that dangled from the bony ankle, keeping rhythmic time to
the plunketty-plink-tinketty-plunk.

He had expected to miss the familiar faces on Main Street. He had even
expected to miss the neighbours with whom he and his mother had so
rarely mingled. All the hundred little, intimate, trivial, everyday
things that had gone to make up his life back home in Marvin,
Texas--these he had expected to miss.

And he didn't.

A