"Anything better?" repeated he. "When you've had more experience, May, perhaps you won't think there is anything better."
May began to look sober, and even to have the appearance of feeling that the conversation was becoming positively improper.
"I think you are just horrid!" she declared. "I do wish you'd behave."
He gave her a respite for some moments, and they drove along through the sunlight of the April afternoon. The trees as they came into the country were beautiful with the buds and promise of nearing summer; the air soft with that cool smoothness which is a reminder that afar the breeze has swept fragments of old snowdrifts yet unmelted; the sky moist with the mists of snow-fields that have wasted away. All the landscape was exquisite with delicate hues.
The supreme color-season of New England begins about the middle of March, and lasts—at the very latest—until the middle of May. Its climax comes in late April, when pearly mists hover among the branches that are soon to be hidden by foliage. Glowing tints of amethyst, luminous gray, tender green, coral, and yellow white, make the woods a dream of poetic loveliness beside which the gorgeous and less varied hues of autumn are crude. Something dreamlike, veiled, mysterious, is felt in these tints, this iridesence of the woods in spring; as if one were looking at the luminous, rosy mists within which, as Venus amid the rainbow-dyed foam of the sea, is being shaped to immortal youth and divine comeliness the very goddess of spring. The red of the maple-buds shows from afar; the russet leaflets of the ash, the vivid green, the amber, the pearl, and the tawny of the clustering hardwood trees, set against the heavy masses of the evergreens, are far more lovely than all the broad coloring of summer or the hot tints of autumn.
Under the afternoon sun the woods that day were at their best, and presently May spoke of the colors which spread down the gentle slopes of the low hills not far away.
"Isn't it just too lovely for anything!" she said. "Just look at that hill over there. It is perfectly lovely."
Jack glanced at the hill, and then looked at her teasingly.
"That's right," he remarked. "Of course spoony people ought to talk about spring, and how perfectly lovely everything is."
"I didn't say that because we're engaged," returned May, rather explosively. "I really meant it."