The world was beautiful to him at this moment, and he had a desire to drink it up, to be as young and as rich as Apollo. He did feel very rich, not only in his youth, but in the unnamed possibilities trembling before him; and Peter denied himself no pleasure because it was inappropriate to the moment. It would have seemed to him a refusal of the good gifts of life and an affronting of the God who created plenty if, because he had lost Electra, he renounced the delight of a happiness he really felt. By and by he would remember Electra, how dignified she was, how irreproachable, in the moments when her virtues did not get the bit between their teeth and dash away with her; but now, under this abounding summer sun, with the leaves trembling, she withdrew into a gray seclusion like an almost forgotten task—one that had resolved itself into a beneficent fulfillment quite unlike what it had promised. Noble as it was, he had been excused from it, and he felt blissfully free. Something else that swam before him like the gleam of a vision did not look like another task. It was more like a quest for a hero's arming. It fitted his dreams, it went hand in hand with the visions he had had years ago about his painting, when that was all possibility, not work. This was the worshipful righting of an innocent lady.
She was there in view when he got home, as if she had waited for him, under a tree, trembled about by the summer green, her white dress flickered upon by leaves. She was pale; her mouth looked piteous to him, and his heart beat hard in championship. She half rose from her chair, and let her unread book fall to the grass beside her.
There were two things Rose wanted very much to know: whether Electra had shocked him out of his trust in her, and why her father stayed so long in that visit to Osmond at the plantation. The last question was the great one, and she asked it first.
"What can my father be saying to him?"
"Osmond? I don't know. Equal rights, labor, capital, God knows. Rose, don't sit there. Please get up!"
She obeyed, wondering, brushed out her skirt and put her hair straight, and then glanced at him.
"What for?" she asked. "What do you want me to do?"
Peter looked to her about eighteen, perhaps, nothing but youth and gleam and gay good luck. She felt a thousand years older herself, yet she loved Peter dearly. She would do anything for him. This she told herself in the moment of smoothing down her hair. His face brimmed over with fun, with something else, too. The seriousness that dwells housemate to comedy was behind.
"I couldn't say it with you lying there and looking at me," said Peter. "Nobody ever made a proposal to a lady in a steamer chair unless he was in another and the deck was level."
"Peter," she said gravely, "don't make fun."