Judge Me Not Read Online Free Page B

handful, that one.”
    Marcia put her elbows on the table, rested her chin on her fist. “She thinks she’s in love with you, Teed. Been mooning around lately. She’s never been—quite this obvious about it before.”
    It was a relief to have it in the open. “It puts me on a spot,” he said.
    “I know,” Marcia said.
    “What spot? What kind of spot?” Powell demanded.
    “Don’t you see it, Daddy?” Marcia said, almost impatiently. “If he laughs at her or brushes her off too hard, she’ll do something terribly silly, or terribly wrong. If he acts so that she thinks he’s encouraging her, it will just get worse. Teed has to walk right on top of the fence until she gets over it.”
    Teed gave her a grateful look.
    “By next summer,” Powell said, “she’ll be working at that summer camp, and then in September she’ll be going away to school.”
    “October to June seems short to you, Daddy. To Jake it’s like several years.”
    “I’ll have a talk with her,” Powell said heavily.
    “Please,” Marcia said. “No.”
    Later, after the dishes were cleaned up, Powell Dennison made one of his customary awkward attempts to throw Marcia and Teed together. “You see him out, please, Marcia. Teed, let me know as soon as you get back in the morning.”
    Teed and Marcia went out onto the front porch. The midnight was cool. She leaned against the railing, her arms folded against the cold. He stood with the cigar box, re-wrapped in the brown paper, under his arm.
    “I think you’re handling it very well,” Marcia said.
    “Oh, Jake? I’m not doing anything. She’s quite a kid, you know.”
    “She’s a very lusty young girl,” Marcia said remotely. The distant street light touched her pale hair, making it look silver, making it look like the smooth sheen of fast water in moonlight.
    “ ’Night, Marcia. Thanks for the party.”
    “Good night, Teed.”
    As he backed out the driveway he saw that she still stood there, hips braced against the railing, arms folded, shoulders slightly hunched. In some obscure way she always managed to annoy him. She was like the clear ice on a winter stream where, if you look closely, you can imagine that you see the water bubbling by underneath. Seven years of responsibility for the household. Maybe that had done it.
    Responsibility like that could do odd things to a girl like Marcia. With the death of her mother, the home could have fallen apart. Powell Dennison, with his dedication to his work, Jake, with her streak of wildness, both needed some focal point, some sane stability on which to depend. Marcia gave of herself, gave up her freedom, gave up a part of her individuality, for the sake of the home.
    And, as with all forms of martyrdom, Teed knew that the danger was that she would learn to like it, possibly had already begun to like it, to value the deep sad wells of self-pity more than the lost freedom.
    Once again he found himself thinking of the lovely Ronnie, of days long gone. Ronnie, who couldn’t wait. Ronnie, the Dayton wife of the insurance man. He knew he had been a fool to expect her to wait. There was no waiting in Ronnie. A war made no difference to her vast insatiable impatience.
    So the little dark man had grabbed her deftly a monthafter Teed had left. There had been two possible futures for Ronnie. Either someone married her and chained her with children, with clockwork pregnancies, or she would become a tramp—not because there was any evil in her, any coarseness—but merely because she was driven and harried and spurred on by both a strong consciousness of the passing of time, and by the delusion that there was only one way, one fundamental way of making time stand still for a little while. Teed knew the accepted explanations of nymphomania. None of them seemed to fit Ronnie. He had a symbolic picture of her in his mind. A tiny naked Ronnie running, endlessly screaming, down a narrow empty street, running by all the sleep-shops, by the window