“But why do you cavil at it so?” said the Baxter girl slowly.
“Only at its plain meaning. Grant the parody and——”
“But why can’t you just read it as it stands? Why do you say sentimental? I—I liked it.”
“But, my dear child, _any_body can write this sort of thing. Where’s the passage the ladies’ papers rave about, where they have a day on the river together?” She whipped over the pages while I said to the Baxter girl—
“What is it? What’s it about? What’s the plot?”
“Oh, there isn’t any. That’s what they complain of. It’s just a little artist’s model who sits to an elderly, broken-down dreamer, and thinks him a god. The duke and door-mat touch. It’s just how two people fall in love and find it out. It’s as simple as A, B, C. But people ate it when it came out.”
“Treacle, I tell you,” insisted Mr. Flood.
... and they landed at last in a meadow of brilliant, brook-fed grass.
She had no words in which to say a thousand times ‘How beautiful!’ Words? She had never known a country June. She had never seen whole hedges clotted with bloom, she had never in all her life breathed the perfume of the may or heard a lark’s ecstasy. She had never—and to her simplicity there was no break in the chain of thought—she had never before been alone with him, unpaid, not his servant but his equal and companion. How should she have words?
She sat in the grass with the tall ox-eyes nodding at her elbow and looked at him from under her hat with a little eased sigh. This, after the dust of the journey, of the day, of her life, was bliss. She prepared herself for this bliss, deliberately, as she did everything. She was too poor and too hungry to be wasteful of her happiness: she must have every crumb. Therefore she had looked first at herself, critically, with her trained eye, fingering the frill of her blouse, flinging a scatter of skirt across her dusty city feet, lest her poverty should jar his thoughts of her.
Then she looked at him. She saw him for a moment with undazzled eyes, the blue sky enriched with clouds behind him. She was saying to herself—‘I’m not a fool. I can see straight. I know what he is. He’s just an ordinary man in a hot, black suit. He stoops, I suppose. He’s worn out with work. He’ll never be young again. And there’s nothing particular about him. Then what makes me like him? But I do. I do. He has only to turn and smile at me——’