Some time during this August, probably the latter part, Helen wore her third degree hat and the new frock. This hat lies now in an old trunk above the attic stairs in the house of Helen. I have seen it. A leghorn with a wide floppy brim, stiff, a little askew and out of shape, as you would be yourself if you had lain so long without so much as a breath of wind to stir you. There is a good deal of lace and ribbon on it and a wreath of wild roses. It looks funny, as a hat always does when it is long out of style, or as a love letter reads when you have been married twenty years to the man who wrote it. But with all there remained something gay and confident about this hat, like the wistful smile and sweetness of a girl’s face, as no doubt there remains in the latter those former scriptures of a valorous love.
Helen was standing beside me when I fished up this little ghost of a hat and held it up in the warm light of the attic. “Put it on,” I exclaimed, not meaning to be irreverent.
“No; oh, no,” she said, drawing back. “It would not become me now.”
And it would not, any more than the love letter would have become the sentiments of the poor, tired, old, middle-aged husband who wrote it long ago.
But what I set out to tell when the former Helen’s hat intrigued me was that she went for a walk with George the first time she wore it. Shannon at that time was such a brief little town that you could step out of it into the open country almost at once.
They took the river road, which was not in very good repute with the guardians and parents of Shannon, for no better reason than that it was sanctified by the vows of so many lovers. But what would you have? These lovers require privacy and some fairness of scenery for their business. You may involuntarily publish love on a street corner, but you cannot declare it there. Your very nature revolts at the idea. So does society. You would be arrested for staging a love scene in public. Old people are not reasonable about this. Parental parlor-supervision has produced more unhappy old maids than the homely features of these victims.
When they had come some distance along the road, George drew her arm in his, and they went on in this beatific silence. “Helen,” he said, “if you should say anything, what would you say?”
She looked, caught his red brown eyes smiling down at her and blushed. “Why, I was not going to say anything. I was just thinking,” she answered.
“What?” he insisted.
“How happy I am now, this moment, and—” she halted.