0.1 Book report on "advesary in the house_part2" by irving stone.  (Page 2/5)

Gene put his hands under her arms and lifted her on to the desk. She was light almost ethereal, yet when he felt her warm strong flesh under his fingers and felt the fullness of her figure against him, there was nothing ethereal about her.

“You keep a lot of charts, don’t you?”

“Yes”.

“You know everything that happened, and when?”

“Every thing!”

“Then would you consult one of your charts and find out when you kissed me last ?”

“My charts only go back to the beginning of the century”.

“Those are the nicest words you have said to me for a long while”, she sighed.

He turned his face slightly and before he knew it his lips were on hers: her mouth was so alive, so sweet, he felt that this was the most important, the most beautiful thing that could happen to anyone. Gloria murmured against his cheek:

“You will come for a walk? It is so lovely along the river now”.

With the deepest reluctance he made the painful movement of stepping back so that his lean chest no longer harboured the softness of her bosom. Miserable he murmured:

“No, I can’t Gloria.”

“Oh, darling, why not? You work so hard all the week at Hulman’s . And then every night here. You must have a few hours of pleasure. You will become ill. You cannot work all the time.” Gene dropped heavily into a chair, ran the back of his hand over his eyes.

“I am tired.”

She jumped off the desk, took his two hands in hers and tried to raise him from the chair. “Gloria, I started too late. I am like a child amongst these books. The most elemental things I don’t know…… there are great blank spaces……..”

“But, Gene, you are young, you are not even twenty-one yet, you have all your life to do the work. You don’t have to finish it all today, this week.”

Gene held her hand against his cheek.

I will never get it finished, Gloria. Not if I live to be thousand. So many have tried and they end up with nothing.”

“Then if you are going to end up with nothing in work, I am not going to let you end up with nothing in your life. At least you will have memories: you will remember that on a warm spring day in 1876 you walked hand in hand with your girl along the Wabash,with the poplar greens and the whirlpool wills calling across the river.”

Gene dropped her hand, he had a sharp pain at the back of his head. Gloria waited for a moment, then said quietly:

“Gene ! you must not become a fanatic. They do no good, either to themselves or to anyone else.”

He rose, went up to the table, straightened out some papers. When he spoke it was gently and the pain was gone.

“It is not fanaticism, Gloria. Every new fact I find, every new conclusion brings me joy. Can’t you understand? It means that I have a got a job. It means I am being useful. That is when I am happier than I have ever been in my life “.

She stood gazing at him, eyes troubled. She was deeply interested in this Union he was trying to build and the work he was doing because she saw that it made him happy. She had wanted him to be happy because happiness is a fertile field for love. She wanted him settled so that he may start thinking in terms of permanence. She was not ambitious for him to make a great deal of money: that had never been an objective of the Weston Family; nor did she feel that he had gone backwards by working for the foreman’s union, as her wealthy cousins had warned her. She knew that Gene liked her, that he carred for no one else It had been natural for her to assume that like every other young man in Terra Haute, he too would marry his best girl when he was twenty-one.