“Well, I’m not!” she retorted. “Come on, eat. I just threw in some rolls and cold chicken and pickles and a few peaches.”
The man turned and gave his attention to the lunch and ate with evident enjoyment, but several times Amanda felt his keen eyes scrutinizing her face. “What ails him?” she thought.
“This is great, this is just the thing!” he told her several times during the time of lunch. “Let’s do this often, come up here where the air is pure.”
“All right,” she agreed readily. “It will do you good to get up in the hills. I don’t see how you stand being housed in a city in the summer! It must be like those awful days in the early spring or in the fall when I’m in the schoolroom and rebel because I want to be outdoors. I rebel every minute when the weather is nice, do it subconsciously while I’m teaching the states and capitals or hearing tables or giving out spelling words. Something just keeps saying inside of me, ’I want to be out, want to be out, be out, be out!’ It’s a wonder I don’t say it out loud sometimes.”
“If you did you’d hear a mighty echo, I bet! Every kid in the room would say it after you.”
“Yes, I’m sure of that. I feel like a slave driver when I make them study on days that were made for the open. But it’s the only way, I suppose. We have to learn to knuckle very early.”
“Yes, but it’s a great old world, just the same, don’t you think so?”
“It’s the only one I ever tried, so I’m satisfied to stay on it a while longer,” she told him.
They laughed at that as only Youth can laugh at remarks that are not clever, only interesting to each other because of the personality of the speaker.
So the afternoon passed and the two descended again to the dusty country road, each feeling refreshed and stimulated by the hours spent together.