Missy was absent-eyed at the midday dinner, but no sooner was the meal over before she feverishly attacked the darning-basket again. Her energy may have been explained when, as soon as the stockings were done, she asked her mother if she might go down to the Library.
Mother and Aunt Nettie from their rocking-chairs on the side-porch watched the slim figure in its stiffly-starched white duck skirt and shirt-waist disappear down shady Locust Avenue.
“I wonder what Missy's up to, now?” observed Aunt Nettie.
“Up to?” murmured Mrs. Merriam.
“Yes. She hardly touched her chop at dinner and she's crazy about lamb chops. She's eaten almost nothing for days. And either shirking her work, else going at it in a perfect frenzy!”
“Growing girls get that way sometimes,” commented Missy's mother gently. (Could Missy have heard and interpreted that tone, she might have been less hard on grown-ups who “don't understand.”) “Missy's seventeen, you know.”
“H'm!” commented Aunt Nettie, as if to say, “What's THAT to do with it?” Somehow it seems more difficult for spinsters than for mothers to remember those swift, free flights of madness and sweetness which, like a troop of birds in the measurable heavens, sweep in joyous circles across the sky of youth.
Meanwhile Missy, the big ribbon index under her sailor-brim palpitantly askew, was progressing down Locust Avenue with a measured, accented gait that might have struck an observer as being peculiar. The fact was that the refrain vibrating through her soul had found its way to her feet. She'd hardly been conscious of it at first. She was just walking along, in time to that inner song:
“Cosmos—cosmos—cosmos—cosmos—”
And then she noticed she was walking with even, regular steps, stepping on every third crack in the board sidewalk, and that each of these cracks she stepped on ran, like a long punctuation, right through the middle of “cosmos.” So that she saw in her mind this picture: |Cos|mos| |cos|mos| |cos|mos| |cos|mos|