So Big Edna Ferber (most romantic novels txt) 📖

pretty bum second mate. And as for you, Gene my love, cabin boy would be, y’understand me, big.” Eugene had gone into the business a year before.

“What can you expect,” retorted Eugene, “of a lad that hates salt pork? And every other kind of pig meat?” He despised the yards and all that went with it.

Selina now got up and walked to the end of the porch. She looked out across the fields, shading her eyes with her hand. “There’s Adam coming in with the last load for the day. He’ll be driving into town now. Cornelius started an hour ago.” The DeJong farm sent two great loads to the city now. Selina was contemplating the purchase of one of the large automobile trucks that would do away with the plodding horses and save hours of time on the trip. She went down the steps now on her way to oversee the loading of Adam Bras’s wagon. At the bottom of the steps she turned. “Why can’t you two stay to supper? You can quarrel comfortably right through the meal and drive home in the cool of the evening.”

“I’ll stay,” said Paula, “thanks. If you’ll have all kinds of vegetables, cooked and uncooked. The cooked ones smothered in cream and oozing butter. And let me go out into the fields and pick ’em myself like Maud Muller or Marie Antoinette or any of those make-believe rustic gals.”

In her French-heeled slippers and her filmy silk stockings she went out into the rich black furrows of the fields, Dirk carrying the basket.

“Asparagus,” she ordered first. Then, “But where is it? Is that it!”

“You dig for it, idiot,” said Dirk, stooping, and taking from his basket the queerly curved sharp knife or spud used for cutting the asparagus shoots. “Cut the shoots three or four inches below the surface.”

“Oh, let me do it!” She was down on her silken knees in the dirt, ruined a goodly patch of the fine tender shoots, gave it up and sat watching Dirk’s expert manipulation of the knife. “Let’s have radishes, and corn, and tomatoes and lettuce and peas and artichokes and⁠—”

“Artichokes grow in California, not Illinois.” He was more than usually uncommunicative, and noticeably moody.

Paula remarked it. “Why the Othello brow?”

“You didn’t mean that rot, did you? about marrying a rich man.”

“Of course I meant it. What other sort of man do you think I ought to marry?” He looked at her, silently. She smiled. “Yes, wouldn’t I make an ideal bride for a farmer!”

“I’m not a farmer.”

“Well, architect then. Your job as draughtsman at Hollis & Sprague’s must pay you all of twenty-five a week.”

“Thirty-five,” said Dirk, grimly. “What’s that got to do with it!”

“Not a thing, darling.” She stuck out one foot. “These slippers cost thirty.”

“I won’t be getting thirty-five a week all my life. You’ve got brains enough to know that. Eugene wouldn’t be getting that much if he weren’t the son of his father.”

“The grandson of his grandfather,” Paula corrected him. “And I’m not so sure he wouldn’t. Gene’s a born mechanic if they’d just let him work at it. He’s crazy about engines and all that junk. But no⁠—‘Millionaire Packer’s Son Learns Business from Bottom Rung of Ladder.’ Picture of Gene in workman’s overalls and cap in the Sunday papers. He drives to the office on Michigan at ten and leaves at four and he doesn’t know a steer from a cow when he sees it.”

“I don’t care a damn about Gene. I’m talking about you. You were joking, weren’t you?”

“I wasn’t. I’d hate being poor, or even just moderately rich. I’m used to money⁠—loads of it. I’m twenty-four. And I’m looking around.”

He kicked an innocent beet-top with his boot. “You like me better than any man you know.”

“Of course I do. Just my luck.”

“Well, then!”

“Well, then, let’s take these weggibles in and have ’em cooked in cream, as ordered.”

She made a pretense of lifting the heavy basket. Dirk snatched it roughly out of her hand so that she gave a little cry and looked ruefully down at the red mark on her palm. He caught her by the shoulder⁠—even shook her a little. “Look here, Paula. Do you mean to tell me you’d marry a man simply because he happened to have a lot of money!”

“Perhaps not simply because he had a lot of money. But it certainly would be a factor, among other things. Certainly he would be preferable to a man who knocked me about the fields as if I were a bag of potatoes.”

“Oh, forgive me. But⁠—listen, Paula⁠—you know I’m⁠—gosh!⁠—And there I am stuck in an architect’s office and it’ll be years before I⁠—”

“Yes, but it’ll probably be years before I meet the millions I require, too. So why bother? And even if I do, you and I can be just as good friends.”

“Oh, shut up. Don’t pull that ingénue stuff on me, please. Remember I’ve known you since you were ten years old.”

“And you know just how black my heart is, don’t you, what? You want, really, some nice hearty lass who can tell asparagus from peas when she sees ’em, and who’ll offer to race you from here to the kitchen.”

“God forbid!”

Six months later Paula Arnold was married to Theodore A. Storm, a man of fifty, a friend of her father’s, head of so many companies, stockholder in so many banks, director of so many corporations that even old Aug Hempel seemed a recluse from business in comparison. She never called him Teddy. No one ever did. Theodore Storm was a large man⁠—not exactly stout, perhaps, but flabby. His inches saved him from grossness. He had a large white serious face, fine thick dark hair, graying at the temples, and he dressed very well except for a leaning toward rather effeminate ties. He built for Paula a town house on the Lake Shore drive in the region known as the Gold Coast. The house looked like a restrained public library. There was a country place beyond