"Because," I answered evasively.
"Your answer is as rude as though I were twenty, instead of sixteen,"
said Sweetheart. "If you treat me as a child from this moment, I shall
hate you."
"Me--Sweetheart?"
"And that name!--it is good for children and kittens."
I looked at her seriously. "It is good for women, too--when it is
time," I said. "I prophesy that one day you will hear it again. As for
me, I shall not call you by that name if you dislike it."
"I am a woman--now," she said.
"Oh! at sixteen."
"To-morrow I am to be seventeen."
Presently, looking off at the blue hills, I said: "For a long time
I have recognised that that subtle, indefinable attitude--we call
it deference--due from men to women is due from us to you. Donny and
Walter are slower to accept this. You know what you have been to us
as a child; we can't bear to lose you--to meet you in another way--to
reckon with you as we reckon with a woman. But it is true: our little
Sweetheart has vanished, and--_you_ are here!"
The oak leaves began to rustle in the hill winds; the crows cawed from
the woods.
"Oui c'est moi," she said at length.
"I shall never call you Sweetheart again," I said, smiling.
"Who knows?" she laughed, and leaned over to pick a blade of wild
wheat. She coloured faintly a moment later, and said: "I didn't mean
that, Jack."
And so Sweetheart took her first step across that threshold of mystery,
the Temple of Idols. And of the gilded idols within the temple, one
shall turn to living flesh at the sound of a voice. And lo! where
a child had entered, a woman returned with the key to the Temple of
Gilded Idols.
"Jack," said Sweetheart, "you are wrong. No day is too fair to kill in.
I shall pick my arms full--full of flowers."
Over the yellow fields, red with the stalks of the buckwheat, crowned
with a glimmering cloud of the dusty gold of the golden-rod, Sweetheart
passed, pensive, sedate, awed by the burden of sixteen years.