In another spot, on the lawn, I saw a young man in evening dress chaffing a bare-shouldered girl who looked no more than fifteen
"What! Sweet sixteen and not yet kissed?" he said to her, aloud. "Go on! I don't believe it. Anyhow, I'd like to be the fellow who's going to get you."
"Would you? I'll tell your wife about it," the little girl replied, with the good humor of a woman of forty
"Never mind my wife. But how about the fellow who is going to marry you?"
"I'd like to see him myself. I hope he ain't going to be some boob."
The air was redolent of grass, flowers, ozone, and sex. All this was flavored with Miss Tevkin's antipathy for me
CHAPTER V
THE next morning I awoke utterly out of sorts. That I was going to take the first train for Tannersville seemed to be a matter of course, and yet I knew that I was not going to take that train, nor any other that day. I dressed myself and went out for a walk up the road, some distance beyond the grove.
The sun was out, but it had rained all night and the sandy road was damp, solid, and smooth, like baked clay. It was half an hour before breakfast-time when I returned to my cottage across the road from the hotel.
As I was about to take a chair on the tiny porch I perceived the sunlit figure of Miss Tevkin in the distance. She wore a large sailor hat and I thought it greatly enhanced the effect of her tall figure. She was making her way over a shaky little bridge. Then, reaching the road, she turned into it. I remained standing like one transfixed. The distance gave her new fascination. Every little while she would pause to look up through something that glittered in the sunshine, apparently an opera-glass. I had never heard that opera-glasses were used for observing birds, but this was evidently what she was doing at this moment, and the proceeding quickened my sense not only of her intellectual refinement, but also of her social distinction.