“I don’t know, and I don’t intend to know,” Madeline cried, with such unusual viciousness that the two men stared. “Poor birds!” she said. “I’ve nothing against them, but I’m in rebellion against the bird fad. I’m so tired of meeting people and having them start in with a gushing, ‘Oh, how-de-do! Only fancy, I have just seen a scarlet tanager!’ and you know they haven’t, and they wouldn’t care anyway, and their mother may be dying.”
Ellery laughed, and Dick said:
“Well, what are you going to do about it?”
“I’m going to invent a fad of my own.”
“Let us in on the ground floor.”
“If you like. I’m learning the notes of the wind in the tree-tops. It has such variety! No two trees sound alike. Hear that sharp twitter of the maples? The oak has a deep sonorous song, and the elm’s is as delicate as itself. I believe I could tell them all with my eyes shut.”
“One breeze with infinite manifestations. I suppose our souls twist the breath of the spirit to our own likenesses in the same way,” Ellery said.
Madeline looked at him and he smiled.
“You’re getting poetical, old codger,” said Dick. “You must be in love.” Ellery blushed, but Dick went on, oblivious of byplay. “I move that we celebrate the occasion by a cold collation. Last week, your mother kindly made inquiries about my tastes that led me to infer that everything I most affect is stowed away in that comfortable-looking basket.”
So they had supper, and Norris fished a volume of Shelley from his pocket and read The Cloud, which Dick followed by a really funny story from a magazine. They fell to talking about their own affairs, which to the young are the chief interests. It takes years “that bring the philosophic mind” to make abstractions stimulating. Finally they wafted homeward under a sky dark at the zenith and becoming paler and paler, violet, rose, wan white, with a line of intense violet along the horizon, and, as they sailed, Madeline sang softly as one does in the immediate presence of nature.