# The Red Book Magazine/Volume 39/Number 2/The Swimming Master

Accompanying illustrations by Walt Louderback may be omitted.
The Swimming Master
By Honoré Willsie
Illustrated by Walt Lauderback
JEAN ATWOOD was a bridge engineer. She had been graduated from a Midwestern university, the only woman in a class of eighty, and she had been given special mention tor the originality and soundness of her work in bridge-design.
It sounds high-brow and flat-chested and old-maidish, doesn't it? But don't be discouraged. Jean at twenty-two was tall and slender. She had a mass of curly ruddy-brown hair, wide black eyes and even white teeth that flashed amazingly when she smiled. Her complexion was milk white and deep rose, the heritage of English ancestry. She was the best tennis-player among the five hundred girls in the University, and there was not a baker's of men out of the four thousand who could beat her at game
Jean should have been an unqualified success, socially as well as in the class-room. The fellows liked her, and after the first, did not resent her presence in the school of engineering. She was distractingly pretty. But no one ever flirted with Jean. There were no spring twilights in Lover's Lane for her. No one ever attempted to brush aside what seemed like a veil of dignity that enveloped her.
Why suffer rebuff from a girl whose right over-arm gave a tennis ball an impact like a bullet, and who, if truth be told, was the best mathematician and draftsman in the class?
Jean mourned her social loneliness, but she was too happy in her work and play to diagnose the cause. The truth was that Jean was bashful. She was bashful because she had no self-confidence; she had no self-confidence because she was a coward; and was a coward because a twittery, Victorian, feminine timidity was part of the mental equipment she had inherited from her mother and grandmother, and the timidity had been added to the countless shocks that go with a timid childhood.
Illustration: That Jean had done the courageous deed was due to ability and to a promise made her dying father
That Jean had done the seemingly courageous deed of studying engineering was due merely to an overweening taste and ability in that direction, and to a promise made to her dying father. That she was a first-class tennis player was due to this same father who when she was six had forced her to play. Not that Jean knew that she was a coward. Not that college taught her that she was one. Colleges teach one anything rather than weaknesses of character. It remains for business or marriage to spring these tiny leaks that sink the great ship of one's life.
So Jean finished college, and in July of the same summer betook herself East. She went thither because the dean of the School of Engineering had unbounded faith in a great future for the girl. His enthusiasm landed her in New York. She brought with her one hundred dollars and a letter from the dean to William Elkins of the firm of Elkins and Company, bridge-builders.
It was very hot. The elevator shot Jean to the eighteenth floor of the building on West Street, and a girl who chewed gum managed the switchboard and received callers shunted Jean into a bare little reception-room. She waited there for half an hour. Finally a door marked “Private” opened, and a_ stenographer came out.
“Mr. Elkins will see you now,” she said. Jean wondered if the girl could have put more deference into her tone had she announced that Jehovah was about to hold audience, and her knees clacked together as she entered the inner room.
IT was a large room, furnished in mahogany and filled with a vivid glow from the westering sun. There was a huge flat-topped desk in the middle of the room. A man seated before it rose and offered Jean his hand.
Bill Elkins was thirty-two or -three years old at this time. He was tall and slender, with a thin long-jawed Yankee face. His lips were thin and firm, and his blue eyes were large and a little sad. His hair was thick and brown, and no one in the office had ever seen its precise parting ruffled.
Illustration: The boss sat down beside her. “Do you know, if we win this bid, who is going to act as field engineer?” he asked her.
Jean, putting her hand into his warm grasp, was conscious that he was smiling at her as if she were an interesting child.
“My old friend Haskins is certainly an admirer of yours, Miss Atwood,” he said
Jean blushed and smiled. Elkins pushed a chair forward. “Sit down, wont you? I'm frankly curious. This is the first time I've ever met a woman engineer.”
“It's not as strange as it sounds,” returned Jean, getting the best of her blushes. “My mother died when I was a baby, and y father brought me up. He was an inventor and not very successful, but he had more brains than anyone else I've ever known. His heart was set on my being an engineer. So here I am.” She paused and smiled again. There was a flashing beauty in the parted scarlet lips over the white teeth that for some reason made Elkins scowl. “It's not a really unusual story,” she concluded.
“It might be,” objected Elkins, “if one knew the details.” He looked from Jean out of the window and back again at the girl.
Jean waited with breathless eagerness. Suddenly it seemed to her that nothing in the world was worth while except that she get this job. Elkins eyed her very earnestly. His face was lined and slightly tanned, as if he had worked in wind and sun. He considered the eyes set so deeply and far apart, the wide brow and the firm round chin.
“I hate to disappoint you,” he said finally, “but we have nothing open but a draftsman's job at twenty-five a week. And I don't want to give you that. You'd be the only woman in a room full of young men.”
“You! I'm not bothered about you! I'm thinking of those youngsters. You are unnecessarily good-looking for an engineer.”
He noticed that Jean did not blush this time. She sat forward eagerly in her chair.
“Mr. Elkins, you don't know me. That really doesn't count! I don't know why, but I never had a beau, and the fellows all treated me as it I were another boy.”
“It might not count in college,"—Elkins voice was grim—“but it will count in the engineering business. It's counting heavily with me this minute, but against, not for you—as an engineer. I'm not more old-fashioned than other men, but I'll be hanged if I think a very beautiful woman can succeed in a man's profession.”
The room was very silent for a moment. Jean stared out the window. She wished her father were alive. She could have asked his advice. He never had admitted to herself that she was more than passably good-looking.
“I'll dress very plainly,” she said finally, “and wear my hair unbecomingly. It's not fair,” she went on vehemently. “It's not fair to consider me as a woman when I apply for this job. I'm an engineer, and a good one. Your own ability hasn't any sex: nor has mine. Dean Haskins says I have real talent. Don't you need that in your concern?”
“The Lord, He knows we do!” exclaimed Elkins. “We seem to have everything here but talent.”
He read the dean's letter again and tossed it into the filing basket: then he said slowly: “Well, I'll try you on that draftsman's job. It's up to you to get ahead, though, without any help from me. You understand that, don't you?”
Jean nodded. and for e first time a timid look dimmed the brilliancy of her deep eyes.
Elkins rose, taking the dean's letter of introduction from the filing basket. “Come. I'll introduce you to the head draftsman.” Then as if he caught the new look in Jean's eyes, he added with a sudden lapse from his businesslike tones: “And if you don't make good, I shall be more disappointed than I ever was in my life.”
Jean caught her breath, and for a long moment blue eyes looked deep into black. She never was to forget that look. Nor in the difficult months that followed did she misinterpret her own share in it. A man will bluff himself about himself. A woman, particularly a beautiful woman, will not even try to deceive herself about that secret chamber of self where even God may not intrude. Jean, unsophisticated. with so little self-confidence, knew that she was destined to love Bill Elkins.
Illustration: He was a brilliant field engineer, and some of his achievements, when a mere boy fresh from college, were classics.
She followed him down a long hall to the drafting-room. It too was flooded with golden summer light. The eighteen or twenty men all looked up as the door opened, but fell to work again as the boss entered. The head draftsman, Jim Farrow, was the oldest man in the room. He was bald-headed and wore spectacles. His close-shaven face was full of fantastic wrinkles. Jean discovered later that he always made faces when working over a difficult design.
Farrow read the dean's letter with an expressionless eye, showed Jean to her drawing-desk and told her to report at nine o'clock the next morning. What comments he made, if any, to Mr. Elk she did not know. As she grew familiar, however, with the great chasm the boss maintained between himself and his employees, she doubted if Farrow made any remark whatever. But Jean knew as well as if he had said so, that from the moment Farrow laid eyes on her, he resolved that only over his prostrate body should she mount one step in the firm of Elkins and Company and her heart sank within her.
As for the drafting-room itself, it was incredulous. then hostile, then friendly; and then Jean became merely one of the pleasant, well-liked workmen of the firm. Beauty alone does not make a woman desirable in the eyes of man, and true to Jean's prophecy to Elkins no beaux developed among the lads in the drafting-room.
And now, for a long time in the story, nothing happens. Jean's first month merged into a second and third; six months, a year passed. Jean was still an efficient, inoffensive draftsman and nothing more. During all this time she never had more than a greeting from Elkins. Outside the office, matters had gone better. Jean had kept up her tennis on the public courts, and there had made friends of some pleasant, out-of-doors-loving people. But she was not happy. Nor had she, since that first and only interview with Elkins, really expected to be happy again unless a miracle happened. As the months stretched on, she felt that the miracle was less and less likely to materialize, and with her second year in New York, she realized that she was not doing well with the firm of Elkins and Company.
And it was rumored that the firm of Elkins and Company was not doing well in the world of bridge-building. The drafting-room diagnosis of the latter condition was fairly accurate and was interwoven with comment on the boss that Jean at first resented. But as Elkins continued to ignore her existence and her heart continued to yearn over him, she came to believe that all that was said of him was correct.
The drafting-room said that his austerity, his aloofness, his severity, were partly natural and partly due to his Harvard training, that he was not a spot on his father as an office executive, that he was a brilliant field engineer, and it was too bad that he hadn't sense enough to stay in the field after his father's death and let some one else, in fact any one of the draftsmen, run the New York end. Why, ran the gossip, some of his achievements in the field when a mere boy just fresh from college, were classics. His handling of his men, his quick resourcefulness, the speed and sureness of his construction—no one ever had excelled him.
Bill Elkins lacked creative imagination and didn't know it. That was why the firm was not getting the big contracts that it had in the the old man's day. The old man was a real mover. This exclusive Harvard stuff might be all right in an uptown club, but it was a poor commodity on West Street. Too bad Jim Farrow didn't have the nerve to tell the boss the truth about things. And so on and on until Jean began to dream of the poor designs produced by Elkins and Company.
She had been with the firm two years, when, leaving the office late one afternoon, she ran onto Elkins in the elevator. To her astonishment. Mr. Elkins added a word or two to his customary greeting
“Still in the drafting-room, Miss Atwood?”
“Yes, Mr. Elkins,” replied Jean, blushing.
He eyed her speculatively, and as the elevator stopped at the main floor, he said slowly:
“I'm disappointed in you.” And putting on his hat, he disappeared out of a side entrance before Jean could close her mouth in her amazement.
“The brute!” she exclaimed to herself as she plunged into the subway. “I'd like to tell him that I'm disappointed in him, and so's everyone else. Conceited snip!”
She dashed into an express and made for a seat. A much-painted and powdered little stenographer pushed her aside and took the place. Jean gave her a furious glance, got an insolent one in return and dangled from a strap to 116th Street, still indignantly repudiating the boss.
“Disappointed in me! Then why doesn't he give me a chance? Think of the Chilean contract we're bidding for! We'll lose that too. I could crochet a better design than the one Mr. Elkins has O.K.'d.”
She was still fuming when she let herself in at the door of the apartment. Her landlady met her in the hall.
“I moved you into the rear room today, Miss Atwood. I had a chance to rent your room for two months at double the rent, and I knew you wouldn't mind.”
“It doesn't seem fair,” said Jean a little fretfully, but with the familiar sinking of the heart at the thought of a row.
“Not fair! Not fair!” The landlady's voice rose.
“Oh, all right!” returned Jean meekly, and she went on into the dark, hot bedroom.
She threw herself down on the couch bed. Disappointed in her! And she had tried so hard! Suggestion after suggestion she had made, and Jim Farrow, through whom all suggestions must be made, merely laughed at her
“Cunning, isn't it?” he'd say of her designs. “Nice tatting pattern. Why don't you try it on a woman's magazine?”
She lay for a long time, bitterly considering her failure. Finally, without going out for supper, Jean went to work on some sketches of her own for the Chilean contract, sketches which sh knew would never reach the eye of either of either the chief engineer of of Bill Elkins......
Illustration: The drafting-room itself was incredulous, then hostile
It was perhaps a week afterward that Jean Atwood spent a Sunday with some of her sport-loving friends at a quiet little resort on the Sound. When the bathing-hour came, Jean in a becoming black suit was playing gingerly in the water close to shore when a man swam in from the float and stood up beside her. It was the boss
“How do you do, Miss Atwood? I was waiting for you to come out to the float.”
“I can't swim,” acknowledged Jear
“Can't swim?”
“No. I'm—I'm afraid of the water.”
Every line of Elkins' lean, tanned face expressed surprise. “Afraid! Why, I saw you play a superb game of tennis this morning. Aren't you afraid of the tennis-balls?”
“No, I'm not. Dad taught me to play when I was a mere baby.”
“Don't you want to learn to swim?” asked the boss
Jean gave a little sigh. “One of the dreams of my life is to be a swimmer. But I've given up all hope.”
Again that look of speculation came to Bill Elkins' blue eyes “Let me give you a lesson. It's really easy. Come! I'll hold up your chin. Try once, just to please me.”
Jean's vivid lips closed firmly. Some of the high color left her cheeks, and her dark eyes widened. But she allowed Elkins to lower her slowly into the water, where for a moment she struggled with the breast-stroke
“One—two—three!” he counted. “One—two—three! Hold your breath now; a wave is coming.”
Jean tried to obey, but as the wave struck them, she gave a shriek and threw her arms about the boss with the desperation of the drowning. He held her fast to him, and for a moment, after the wave receded, the two clung to each other, heart beating against heart. Then a second wave followed unexpectedly close on the heels of the other, and Jean dashed for the shore. Elkins made no attempt to follow her.
“Coward!” he called after her contemptuously: and as Jean, stung to fury, turned, he plunged into the water and swam deliberately back to the float.
Jean flung herself down in the sand. “'Coward!' First he's disappointed in me! Then he insults me! The snob! I'm going to get a job somewhere else.”
She jerked her cap off to dry her hair and watched the “snob” make a perfect dive off the float. She watched a dozen other people, men, women and children, dive, somersault and otherwise disport themselves like porpoises in the water. The snob showed a red-haired woman the trudgeon-stroke
“The brute!” Jean murmured. “As if he weren't a failure himself! Somebody ought to tell him a few things.”
She sat in the sun for a few minutes longer; then she suddenly leaped to her feet and went into the dressing-room.
Jean was very silent the rest of the day. She won two sets of tennis in the afternoon, but found no joy in the winning; and when she went to bed, it was with a look as nearly grim as was it was with a look as nearly grim as was possible with her.
THE next afternoon Jean obtained grudging permission from old Jim Farrow to leave the office an hour early. At five o'clock, a little white about the lips, she entered a building that she had passed every week day for two years.
“I want to see the swimming master,” she said to the young man at the desk. A tall blond man in white flannels, his thick mop of yellow hair damp and waving, came in at the young woman's call.
“I'm the greatest fool in the world about swimming,” said Jean a little breathlessly. “I just can't learn. Do you think you could do anything with me?”
The swimming master looked Jean over. She had the keen, lean appearance of the athlete, unmistakable to the trained eye.
“I can teach you,” he said, “if you'll come to the pool.”
“Why, of course, I'll come to the pool!” exclaimed Jean.
“Not 'of course' at all,” retorted the swimming master. “You can't swim, probably, because you're afraid of water. Even if you agree to take lessons, you'll probably think up excuses not to come—just because you're afraid!”
“How do you know?” asked Jean indignantly
The young man smiled, his gray eyes lighting up as he did so. “I've taught swimming for ten years,” he replied.
Jean set her teeth. “I'll give you my word of honor I will. More than that, I'll pay in advance. How much will it cost, and how long will it take?”
“I don't know just how long. But if you really want to develop form and finish, you'd better come five times a week for six months. And that will cost you—” He named a sum that made Jean's heart sink. It would clean out her little savings-account. She gave a slight shiver.
“I'll be here tomorrow,” she said.
The next six months of Jean's life should be told in terms of the swimming pool. Outwardly, at least, all her other interests slipped into second place. She gave up indoor tennis entirely. Even her favorite evening occupation of bridge-drawing became a thing of mere habit. The Chilean contract was bid for and lost. When news of this reached the dratting-room, Jean shrugged her shoulders, and her mind went back to the intricacies of the breast-stroke
There is but one thing in life more powerful than human fear, and that is the human will. Jean's cowardice and Jean's will were engaged in a battle the proportions of which only the swimming Jean knew
Every day for months, as the clock neared five, Jean became conscious of a weight in the pit of her stomach. Every day for months at five o'clock she lifted her hand toward the telephone to plead indigestion as an excuse for no swimming lesson that day. Every day, as she thus lifted her hand, came a flashing vision of two faces—the boss', contemptuous of lip, speculative of eye, and the swimming master's, firm of jaw and steady of gaze. Every day at five-thirty she presented herself at the pool with the lump in her stomach crowding up against her heart, with her knees shaking, her lips dry. Every day at five-forty-five the swimming master entered the pool with her
It was a beautiful pool. It lay like a great square translucent emerald in the white-tiled hall. But it was long before Jean could think of it with anything but horror. The swimming master never made the slightest concession to her cowardice. He never lost patience with her. He never allowed her to leave the pool without accomplishing the day's stint.
He forced her to force herself to hold her head under water again and again and again until this initial fear left her. He enticed her gently but none the less implacably to lie on her back in the shallow end of the pool. She clutched at him wildly for many days, but finally came a day when, though her was white and her lips were twisted. she released her hold on him and lay floating on the transparent bosom of the pool.
Then came a day when the swimming master bade her lie on her back while he, swimming with his shoulder beneath pushed her the length of the pool. Jean stared at him, abject misery in her eyes. He returned the look.
“I'll never give in to you. You know that, don't you?” he asked.
Jean, clinging to the edge of the pool, turned slowly over her back. Very gently, very slowly, the swimming master, bringing his shoulder against hers, began to swim down the pool. Jean kept her head until the black numbers on the pool edge said eight feet. Then with a scream she clutched the swimming master round the neck. Treading water, he removed her clinging arms.
“You may as well be quiet, because we are going the length of the pool again and again.”
Jean, threshing about in the vain endeavor to clutch him, did not hear this sentence till its third or fourth repetition. Then she became conscious that her head was being held carefully above water. She grew quiet, and the trip continued. Once at the end of the pool, however Jean refused to return. The swimming master sat down comfortably on the steps.
“I can wait as you can,” he said. “This time you've got to ask me to tow you down the pool, and when we reach the eight-foot mark, you must float alone while I count sixty.”
Jean's tragic face, turned pleadingly to his, was very lovely, but though the swimming master was a kindly-looking man, he did not soften.
It was eight o'clock that night when Jean left the pool. Before she left, she had of her own volition paddled herself slowly on her back the length of the pool. The swimming master watched her from the steps with inscrutable eyes. When she clambered unsteadily up beside him, he smiled.
“Tired?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied Jean. “Aren't you?”
“Yes, I am,”—rising wearily. “I'll look for you tomorrow at the usual time.”
It was considerably easier after that—not but what Jean had to will herself uncompromisingly each day for a long time go to the pool, not but what as she undertook the breast-stroke the swimming master was obliged for many days to wear his look of implacability. But she learned the stroke in beautiful form, and by degrees followed this with others. She had been swimming several months, however, before she overcame the fear of the water.
There came an afternoon when, as Jean had gone carefully down the steps into the water, as usual, the swimming master said:
“This is the beginner's dive. Watch me closely. Hands so! Head so! Knees so!” and he made a curving, silent drop into the green water
When he was back beside her, Jean met his level look with the old horror in her eyes.
“Go ahead, Miss Atwood.” he said.
“Give me time,” whispered Jean.
She walked slowly out to the end of the springboard, and stood, a tense, slender figure, gazing at the shimmering green depths below. Her face was white, her lips compressed. Five minutes went by, another five. The swimming master neither spoke nor moved. Five minutes more. Suddenly Jean lifted her arms above her head, stooped and dropped into the pool.
She came up half laughing, half sobbing, and in a moment was back on the springboard and had repeated the dive.
Her water fear was gone
MEANTIME matters had been going rather badly for the firm of Elkins and Company. It was losing more and more contracts, and an air of depression hung over the office. At the time of her first dive, the drafting-room was at work on drawings for a railroad bridge in the Andes. Jean, toiling over the strain-sheets, was filled with scorn.
“It's a stupid idea, from start to finish,” she told herself. “They should make a suspension here and not a cantilever. the substructure would be much cheaper. They'll never on earth win this bid.”
The night after Jean had made her first dive, she dreamed that she had dived into the Hudson from a bridge she herself had swung across from Spuyten Duyvil to the Palisades. She woke laughing. On her way to breakfast that morning, she met her landlady in the hall.
“By the way, Mrs. Fisk,” she said, “you took my room away from me for two months, and it's now six. I want it back today.”
The landlady's voice rose shrilly. “You keep the room you've got, and be thankful for it.”
Jean tapped Mrs. Fisk on the shoulder. “Not one cent of rent do you get from me until I'm moved back into my old room. I'm your steadiest roomer, and you need me. I'm through being used for a doormat.” Jean sailed on, followed by Mrs. Fisk's meek, “All right, Miss Atwood.”
JEAN was feeling very fit indeed. As she jammed into the subway train, a young girl who was chewing gum tried to shove her way into the seat Jean was about to confiscate. she plant a well-muscled elbow under the young person's arm.
“Thank you so much,” murmured Jean as she sank into the seat with a smile for the other's scowl.
When she reached her drawing-board, instead of taking up her pencil she gazed long at the detail on which she was work. Then, very deliberately, she shrugged her shoulders and taking a huge bundle of sketches from her locker, she made her way along the hall to the door marked “Private.” She rapped smartly at the door and when Mr. Elkins called “Come in!” she entered without apology.
“Good morning, Mr. Elkins,” she said. “Won't you please ask Mr. Farrow to come in? I have something I want to say to both of you.”
The boss's astonishment shone in his face. “I beg your pardon?” he said.
Jean nodded. “I know it looks queer, but I can't go over Mr. Farrow's head, and he refused to hand my suggestions on to you. So I'm going to see you both together.”
There was silence in the room for a moment while the two eyed each other appraisingly. Then the boss fumbled for the push-button.
Jim Farrow's lower jaw sagged as he came in and saw Jean spreading sketches on the desk.
“Miss Atwood has something to say which she will say only to the two of us, Farrow,” said Mr. Elkins. “We are quite ready, Miss Atwood.”
Jean cleared her throat. Her cheeks were a richer hue than usual; her eyes were deep and clear.
“We all know out in the other room that things aren't going well with our business, that we lose more bids than we win. They say that you, Mr. Elkins, are a field engineer, a construction executive and not a bridge-designer. And as for Mr. Farrow, while he's a first-class draftsman, he couldn't create a culvert for a country road. And he's determined that no woman shall make designs for Elkins and Company. The chief engineer is old-fashioned. He was clever when your father was here to supply the ideas, but he's no good now.”
Jean moistened her lips while the two men stared at each other. Elkins' face was expressionless, but Jim Farrow's was flushed angrily.
“Now, look here, Miss Atwood—” he began.
“Wait a minute, Jim,” said the boss. “What is your suggestion, Miss Atwood?”
“This,” replied Jean, laying her hand on one of the sketches. “Here is an idea for the new bridge which I sketched at home. You see, you aren't bold enough. You stick too closely to tradition! There's no reason why you should do all the expensive grading indicated in the chief engineer's and Mr. Farrow's design. Why not a full steel construction from Hill 31 to Hill 40, like this combination suspension? Then you cut down the expense of your substructure.”
The two men gazed in silence at the sketches. Bold indeed, and graceful, but of obvious strength and simplicity swung the great spider web across the cañon.
“It will demand unusual care and resourcefulness of the field engineer, of course,” said Jean a little breathlessly, “but they say, out in the drafting-room, that you have no equal in America as a field executive. There's the marvelous concrete single arch at El Muerto and the cantilever at Deep River and the the mile suspension trestle at Twin Peaks. You and your father must have made a great team, Mr. Elkins.”
She was speaking as though she and the boss were alone in the room. Jim Farrow looked like a man of stone. Bill Elkins' thin face was deeply flushed. He turned from the sketches to stare out of the window. After a moment he said gruffly:
“Jim, you go out and get the chief. If you'll leave the sketches here, Miss Atwood, I'll call you again in the course of an hour.”
Jean bolted. She realized suddenly that she was very thirsty and very weak about the knees. She returned to her desk sat for a long time, making a sketch of nothing in particular. At the end of that time she was summoned by the stony-faced Farrow.
The chief engineer rose as she entered the room. “My hat is off to you, Miss Atwood. It's a real idea. You've no objections to some changes in detail, have you?”
“That depends!” replied Jean carefully
The boss smiled. “Sit down, Miss Atwood. There are a number of things to go over. Farrow, tell Howard not to start for Arizona today and tell those chaps in the other room there'll night work for the next week. Now, then, Howard.”
THE session lasted until mid-afternoon. When it was finished, Jean's bridge, unchanged in its essentials, was the bridge on which Elkins and Company was to make its bid. She was glad that the rush into which the decision plunged all hands was so great that no one thought to make any particular comment on her share in the shift of plans. So, she knew, would they have treated any man in the firm, and she felt that in taking her contribution for granted they were paying her the final compliment that a woman may receive in the business world.
During the week that followed, nobody slept much, but the drawings, strain-sheets and specifications for the bid were finished on time Friday night. The boss ordered the office closed all day Saturday, and Jean joined the party for a week-end at Atlantic City.
Sunday afternoon they all adjourned in the pool. Jean did not go in at first. She was sitting with her feet dangling in the water, watching her friends splash about, when a pair of long, well-muscled legs appeared beside her, and a familiar, carefully modulated voice said:
“Still afraid to go in, Miss Engineer?”
jean looked up at the boss with startled eyes. “Where did you come from?” she exclaimed.
“I heard Jim tell young Archer of your week-end plan,” replied Elkins. “I may be a failure as a bridge-designer, but I can swim. Would you like me to give you a lesson?”
“Yes, you may try." Jean rose as she spoke. “Come along.” They were at the deep end of the pool, and she dropped over in a clean, silent dive. coming up twenty feet away. Elkins did not stir. Jean came back with a long overarm stroke, shook herself on the steps like a puppy, and dropped down beside the boss
He was a little white about the lips. “Why did you deceive me last summer? It was a cheap trick. You swim as well as you play tennis.”
Jean felt that she had her moment of revenge. “I didn't deceive you!” she cried indignantly. “I couldn't swim a stroke last summer, and I was more afraid of water than you can possibly imagine. But no one can call a coward twice.”
“You mean that you've learned since? Who taught you?”
“A swimming master,” replied Jean thoughtfully, “who is considerable of a person, when you come to think of it.”
“Hadn't you thought of that before?”
“No, I was too busy fighting fear, and after that I was too busy reforming you.” Jean's lovely black eyes, brimming with mischief, turned to the boss.
“What did he have to say about you?” asked Elkins, his face as inscrutable as usual.
“Why, nothing, of course; I was just a pupil.”
The boss dropped his aloof manner sufficiently to grunt. “He must be bald-headed and toothless, then.”
Jean suddenly laughed. She never had had a beau, never had wasted the richness of first love in the little searing processes of flirtation. Yet there was in the snob's manner that she recognized as well as would any accomplished belle.
“Oh, Jean,” called Mrs. Turner, “it's time to go up for dinner! We're all coming out.”
“All right: Ill have a swim and follow shortly,” replied Jean. “Goodness,” she went on the Elkins, “our party is the last in the pool. It's nearly seven o'clock. Come on in. We'll have the water to ourselves.”
The boss plunged in after her. “Show me your strokes,” he said.
BUT Jean had no desire to show off. She had her triumph and was quite content. She laughed again.
“No, it's your turn. I've done my bit.” She climbed up to the marble step at the lower end.
“Whew,” she went on conversationally, “they keep this room too warm, don't they? Go ahead! I can see your stroke from here.”
But the boss, shaking his thick wet hair out of his eyes, sat down beside her. And suddenly there was a boyish look in his face that Jean never before had seen there.
“Do you know, if we win the bid, who is going to act as field engineer?” he asked her.
“No, I don't,” replied jean.
“Well, I am. For five years I've tried to carry out my father's idea that I manage the office, and now I'm through, thanks to you. How did you never come to think it out?“
“I didn't think it out. Everybody in the office knew what a mistake you were making. What I wonder at is where I got the courage to talk to you as I did.”
“Did it take so much courage? I thought”—this very gently—“that though we'd talked to each other m little, we knew each other perfectly from that very first day.”
Jean looked at him quickly, her parted lips giving ever so small a glimpse of her white teeth. The boss laid his hand softly on her warm wet knee. “Didn't it seem so to you?” he urged.
“Yes,” replied jean. “even though you were disappointed in me so long.”
“And you in me!”
They both laughed. Jean looked down at the thin, strong hand on her knee.
“Why do you suppose I never had a beau?” she asked suddenly.
“Probably because you never wanted one. But you've got one now, whether you want him or not. You needn't look around; the attendant went to supper five minutes ago.”
“So must I!” exclaimed Jean. rising.
The boss rose too, and caught both her hands in his.
She lifted her lovely face and stared long and wistfully into the blue eyes above hers. They were very fine blue eyes, with a high degree of pride and intelligence in them. But evidently Jean found more than this in them, for when the boss wrapped her in his arms as if he never meant to let her go, she only put her arms about his neck with that gesture that is as old as Eve, a gesture expressing the highest, the deepest, the sweetest joy that life can hold.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1940, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 83 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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