She heard the sniff and her lips came together to form a noiseless word that she bestows upon me when she thinks I need it.
Then she smiled at me and took from a little bag she had brought with her Mrs. Dana’s book, “How to Know the Wild Flowers,” which she had evidently found among the Wheelock’s possessions.
“That, Minerva, is the wintergreen berry. Taste it and tell me what it reminds you of.”
Minerva’s wide mouth enveloped the dainty berry and she crushed it with her tongue. Then she beamed.
“Chewin’ gum,” said she. “Wish I had some.”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking of that, but they do flavor chewing gum with it, I believe. But could you get anything in the city as pretty as that?”
“Yes, but they don’t grow in the city. Now here’s something that I never noticed before. It says in this book that ‘he who seeks the cool shade of the evergreens on a hot July day is likely to discover the nodding wax-like flowers of this little plant.’ Now let’s see if we can find any. It doesn’t seem likely that the fruit and the blossom would be blooming at the same time.”
“They are, though,” said I. “Found that out when I was a boy. I can never taste wintergreen berries without being reminded of a girl that—”
“Wait, Philip, we’ll be back. I want to see if I can get a flower.”
Ethel always cuts me off when I make any references to my lost youth. She calls them my calf love days and takes no interest in them, while I contend that some of the happiest moments in a man’s life are when he roams the fields in retrospect with a girl who is always ten times prettier than anyone he ever met. I once met one of those old-time beauties and the shock was terrific. I tried to restore her features as I gazed at her, but my imagination balked at the task. She was a good woman, the mother of seven good children, but the vision of the lovely, dancing-eyed, pink-cheeked, rosebud-mouthed, shell-like-eared, dimple-chinned naiad of my early youth was gone.
From the way in which she looked at me, I felt that she had suffered a like shock. The tall, lithe-limbed, high-browed, innocent-faced, clear-eyed, light-hearted boy of sixteen no longer stood before her. Thanks be to the conventions of society, neither one of us wished that our tongues could utter the thoughts that arose in us, and we both had the audacity to speak of the jolly days of long ago, and I left her, thinking that I still considered her the little beauty of 1886, while she left me still imagining that I thought she thought me the handsome youth of the same year.