“You can’t, he protested, “any more than a tree can help budding in April—it can’t help itself, if it’s alive; same with you.”
“Well, then”—and again there was the touch of a sneer—“if I can’t help myself, why trouble, my friend?”
“Because—because I suppose I can’t help myself—if it bothers me, it does. You see, I”—he smiled brilliantly—“am April.”
She paid very little attention to him, but began in a peculiar reedy, metallic tone, that set his nerves quivering:
“But I am not a bare tree. All my dead leaves, they hang to me—and—and go through a kind of danse macabre—”
“But you bud underneath—like beech,” he said quickly.
“Really, my friend,” she said coldly, “I am too tired to bud.”
“No,” he pleaded, “no!” With his thick brows knitted, he surveyed her anxiously. She had received a great blow in August, and she still was stunned. Her face, white and heavy, was like a mask, almost sullen. She looked in the fire, forgetting him.
“You want March,” he said—he worried endlessly over her—“to rip off your old leaves. I s’ll have to be March,” he laughed.
She ignored him again because of his presumption. He waited awhile, then broke out once more.