But on this particular afternoon for the first time I revolted. The effect was physical, in that my feet seemed to be too heavy to be dragged along. They were refusing their job, while my mind was planning it.
Thus in the end I found myself sharing the outing given nominally for the blind boy, but really planned from a complication of motives which to Miss Averill were obscure. It did not help to make them clearer that her wistful, unuttered appeals to me to solve the mystery surrounding my personality passed by without result.
The high bank of an autumn wood, the Hudson with a steamer headed southward, more autumn woods covering the hills beyond, a tea-basket, tea—this was the decoration. We had alighted from the motor somewhere in the neighborhood of Tarrytown. Tea being over, Miss Blair and Drinkwater, with chaff and laughter, were clearing up the things and fitting them back into the basket.
"She's very clever with him," Miss Averill explained, as she led the way to a fallen log, on which she seated herself, indicating that I might sit beside her. "She seizes on anything that will teach him the use of his fingers, and makes a game of it. He's very quick, too. The next time he'll be able to take the things out of the tea-basket and put them back all by himself."
So we had dropped into her favorite theme, the duty of helping the helpless.
She was in brown, as usual, a brown-green, that might have been a Scotch or Irish homespun, which blended with the wine shades and russets all about us with the effect of protective coloration. The day was as still as death, so breathless that the leaves had scarcely the energy to fall. In the heavy, too-sweet scents there was suggestion and incitement—suggestion that chances were passing and incitement to seize them before they were gone.
I wish there were words in which to convey the peculiar overtones in Miss Averill's comparison of herself with a bird in a cage. There was goodness in them, and amusement, as well as something baffled and enraged. She had been so subdued when I had seen her hitherto that I was hardly prepared for this half-smothered outburst of fierceness.
"If you're like a bird in a cage," I said, "you're like the one that sings to the worker and cheers him up."
Her pleasure was expressed not in a change of color or a drooping of the lids, but in a quiet suffusion that might most easily be described as atmospheric.
"Oh, as for cheering people up—I don't know. I've tried such a lot of it, only to find that they got along well enough without me. A woman wants more than anything else in the world to feel that she's needed; and when she discovers she isn't—"