“I don’t know,” Mr. Allen returned absently; and he added with immediate enthusiasm: “I never in my life saw any girl whose hair made such a lovely shape to her head as yours, Lucy! It’s just where you want a girl’s hair to be, and it’s not any place you don’t want it to be. It’s the one thing in the world without any fault at all—the only thing the Lord made just perfect—except your nose and maybe the Parthenon when it was new.”
That brought a laugh from her, and Lucius, who was pink naturally and pinker with the warm day, grew rosy as he listened to Lucy’s laughter. “By George!” he said. “To hear you laugh again!”
“You always did make me laugh, Lucius.”
“Especially if I had anything the matter with me,” he said. “If I had a headache or toothache I’d always come around to get you to laugh. Sometimes if the pain was pretty bad, it wouldn’t go away till you laughed two or three times!”
She laughed the more; then she sighed. “Over ten years, almost eleven—and you saying things like this to every girl and woman you met, all the time!”
“Well,” Mr. Allen said thoughtfully, “nobody takes much notice what a chunky kind of man with a reddish head and getting a little bald says. It’s quite a privilege.”
She laughed again, and sighed again. “Do you remember how we used to sit out here in the evenings under the trees, Lucius? One of the things I’ve often thought about since then was how when you were here, papa and mamma would bring their chairs and join us, and you’d talk about the moon, and astronomy, and the Hundred Years War, and——”
“Yes!” Lucius interrupted ruefully. “And then some other young fellow would turn up—some slim, dark-haired Orlando—and you’d go off walking with him while I stayed with the old folks. I’d be talking astronomy with them, but you and Orlando were strolling under the stars—and didn’t care what they were made of!”
“No,” she said. “I mean what I’ve thought about was that papa and mamma never joined us unless you were here. It took me a long while to understand that, Lucius; but finally I did.” She paused, musing a moment; then she asked: “Do the girls and boys still sit out on front steps and porches, or under the trees in the yard in the evenings the way we used to? Do you remember how we’d always see old Doctor Worley jogging by in his surrey exactly as the courthouse bell rang nine, every night; his wife on the back seat and the old doctor on the front one, coming home from their evening drive? There are so many things I remember like that, and they all seem lovely now—and I believe they must be why I’ve come back here to live—though I didn’t think much about them at the time. Do the girls and boys still sit out in the yards in the evening, Lucius?”
Lucius dangled the ferule of the long-handled blue parasol over the glowing head of a dandelion in the grass. “Not so much,” he answered. “And old Doc Worley and his wife don’t drive in their surrey in the summer evenings any more. They’re both out in the cemetery now, and the surrey’s somewhere in the air we breathe, because it was burnt on a trash-heap the other day, though I’ve seemed to see it driving home in the dusk a hundred times since it fell to pieces. Nowadays hardly any, even of the old folks, ride in surreys. These ten years have changed the world, Lucy. Money and gasoline. Even Marlow’s got into the world; and in the evenings they go out snorting and sirening and blowing-out and smoking blue oil all over creation. Bore Thompson’s about the only man in town that’s still got any use for a hitching-post. He drives an old white horse to a phaeton, and by to-morrow afternoon at the latest you’ll find that old horse and phaeton tied to the ring in the hand of that little old cast-iron stripe-shirted nigger-boy in front of your gate yonder.”