"The very rare gifts of originality and an elfin personality," he assured her. "Besides that you have beauty of the freshest and most colorful sort."
For a moment Blossom flushed again shyly, then she lifted one hand and pointed across the road.
"See thet white flower? Thet's wild parsely. I always calls it the pore relation to the elder bush—but it's jest got to stay a pore relation—always—because it started out thet way."
Henderson, as the summer progressed, discovered an absurd thought lurking in his mind with annoying pertinacity. He could not for long banish the fanciful picture of Blossom Fulkerson transplanted—of Blossom as she might be with fuller opportunities for development. There is an undeniable fascination in building air-castles about the Cinderella theme of human transformations and the sight of her always teased his imagination into play.
That these fantasies bore any personal relation to himself he did not admit or even suspect. Readily enough, and satisfactorily enough he explained to himself that he, who was accustomed to a life of teeming activities, was here marooned in monotony. All things are measurable by contrasts, and in her little world, Blossom stood out radiantly and exquisitely different from her colorless sisters. When he had crossed Cedar Mountain again and boarded a railroad train, more vital things would engage him, and he would promptly forget the beautiful little barbarian.
One hot afternoon in late July Jerry Henderson sat in the lounging-room of his club in Louisville. The windows were open and the street noises, after the still whispers of the mountains, seemed to beat on his senses with discordant insistence. Down the length of the broad, wainscoted hall he saw a party of young men in flannels and girls in soft muslins passing out and he growled testily.
"All cut to a single pattern!" he exclaimed. "All impeccably monotonous!" Then he irrelevantly added to himself, "I'm allowing myself to become absurd—I expect its the damned heat. Anyhow she's Bear Cat Stacy's gal!"
As Jerry sat alone he was, quite unconsciously, affording a theme of conversation for two fellow clubmen in the billiard-room.
"I see Jerry Henderson has reappeared in our midst," commented one. "I wonder what titanic enterprise is engaging his genius just now."
"Give it up," was the laconic reply. "But whatever it is, I'm ready to wager he'll emerge from it unscathed and that everybody who backs him will be ruined. That's the history of his buccaneer activities up to date."