"All of our tribe were slain ... Naa and I alone escaped--
going far off--
To start another people and clan:
She, the woman, and I, the man!"
In my love-drunkenness, I looked directly at Hildreth as I read the
last lines ... she lowered her head and picked at her sandal....
The applause was tumultuous....
Penton Baxter rose to his feet, as chairman of the occasion....
"I'm sure we all thank Mr. Gregory--"
* * * * *
Events trod rapidly on one another's heels. Though Penton had gone on
frequent walks with Darrie, after his day's work,--chiefly because
Hildreth had not wanted to go on walks with him herself, or had not
wanted to accompany them both--yet she and I seized on the precedent
Penton and Darrie had set, and we were abroad most of the time ...
roaming idyllically in the fields, the woods ... passionate ... mad with
the new love that had come to us ... unseeing, in our absorption in each
other's arms ... praying with devout lover's prayers that we were as
unseen as unseeing....
We were abroad in the fields so much that even Penton himself must
notice it....
So we developed the flimsiest of all flimsy pretexts ... pretended to be
engrossed, together, in of all things, the study of--toadstools and
mushrooms ... taking with us Neltje Blanchan's book on _Mushrooms and
Toadstools_, with its beautiful coloured illustrations ... and we did
learn a lot about these queer vegetations that grow without the need of
chlorophyll ... entering into a world of new colours in the vegetable
kingdom ... exquisite pinks and mauves and greys ... blues ... purples
... reds ... russets ... in the darkest spots of the woods we sought and
found strange species of these marvellous growths ... that grow more
readily in the dark and obscurity, the twilights of nature, than in the
open sunlight of green summer days....
* * * * *
Down vistas of forest we often pursued each other ... often got lost so
that it took hours for re-orientation ... once, for awhile, to our great
fright, we could not re-discover our clothes, that we had lightly tossed
aside on the bank of a brook lost and remote,--that had never before
laved a human body in its singing recesses of forest foliage ... for I
had been playing satyr to her nymph, pursuing her....
* * * * *
And each day saw us a little more reckless, more bold and open in our
love, our passion, for each other.
* * * * *
"How handsome love is making you, my Paphnutius!"
I was wearing my bath-robe, had stopped at her cottage a moment, in the
morning, where she sat, in an easy chair, reading peacefully ... I was
on my way for my morning dip in a nearby brook....
My bath-robe, that made me, somehow, feel so aristocratic, so like a
member of the leisure class ... I forgot to tell how I had brought it
all the way from Kansas, together with my MSS.
* * * * *
As I swam about in the brook, not over four feet deep, I sang and
shouted. I had never been so happy in my life....