Blue Ruin Read Online Free PDF Page A

said Dana impatiently. “There you go, off the handle at once, jumping to conclusions. That’s just what I mean. Like an everlasting thermometer, out to check the temperature and be sure it’s just at seventy. You need poise, Lynn! And travel will give it to you. If your school had been any good you wouldn’t be so utterly childish. If I’m to be called to a big-city church, you will need to get poise. There’s nothing like that to help you up in the world and make you able to hold your own.”
    “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Dana,” said Lynette in a small, distant voice, almost like a stranger. “I supposed you were looking forward to preaching the gospel. What has that got to do with social prestige?”
    “A very great deal!” said Dana with the air of a teacher who was condescending to explain to the humblest of pupils. “In the first place, a preacher’s wife can do a lot toward helping or hindering her husband’s progress in his work. She is either an asset or a liability. I have always figured that you, Lynette, with your beauty and your goodness—your most obvious goodness—and your charm of manner would be the greatest kind of an asset. But there is something else. It is something that women of the world have, and that is why they succeed so well.” He floundered a little here, for her eyes were upon him, wondering eyes, as if she had never quite known this Dana before.
    “There is a verse in the Bible,” he suddenly said with irritation, “which you should remember. We are bidden to be wise as serpents! That’s what it means, use worldly wisdom. Acquire the poise that the world has and then we shall be better able to cope with—”
    He paused, searching for a word.
    “Sin?” supplied Lynette questioningly. “I hadn’t really ever thought of it in that way.”
    There was something in her voice that irritated him still further, for he felt that somehow, while he was attempting to show her how she was wrong, she had instead revealed a weakness in himself. Or—could she possibly be laughing at him? He had not made his case as strong as it seemed to him to be. He must try again. You never could force Lynette into a situation, you must always lead her. He ought to have remembered that. She would do anything in the world for him, but of course she did not like his criticism of that little superficial college of hers. That was what was the matter.
    “Lynn,” he said, softening his voice to its old lover-like strain, “I see I haven’t made my meaning plain. It’s all because I don’t like to blow my own trumpet and tell you all the great prospects that have come to me. You see, they’ve been saying a lot of fine things about my work, and my ability, up there at the seminary, and I’ve the same as got the choice of two or three prominent pulpits if I just say the word. Let’s quit this foolish quarreling and let me tell the whole thing. Don’t you want to hear what my senior professor said to me the last day, the man who has the reputation of forecasting the future of his students and never making a mistake?”
    “Why, surely,” said Lynn graciously, her eyes misty with pride in him, despite her disturbed spirit. “You know I enjoy hearing everything about your seminary life. But it never surprises me, Dana. I knew you would excel. Now, tell me every word.”
    There was just the least bit of hurt tone in her voice that he had not felt the same about her, but he did not notice it in his eagerness to tell her, and she was too humble in spirit to assert it again.
    So Dana told.
    Long incidents of class lore. Struggles for scholarly supremacy, days and nights of grinding. Self-denial of a kind, Dana’s kind, the kind that really got what he wanted. Grudging recognition at first on the part of his friends, instant recognition on the part of the professors. Brilliant accounts of arguments and discussions in class in which he came forward with some original thought, was challenged, and