“No, sir. I never, never cut prices on perch.” She brushed past him and stepped into her dory. Then she paused and glanced at the spot where he first appeared to her in a vision. She stepped out again, gathered an armful of fireweed, and was back in her boat. She pushed out and began to row.
He watched her, fascinated. She would pull very evenly and strongly, and then pause to look at something, oars in air. All her movements were like that. She would be still for minutes, and then move like a flash.
Presently she reached the southernmost tip of Old Duck. Here she shipped her oars while she did a most surprising thing. She pulled off her green sweater and tossed it overboard, and away it floated down the river. If he needed any proof of her scorn for money, he had it now. He watched the thing a while and did not know that he was seeing Gratia off.
Chapter 30. Zinc
When he looked back to find his new acquaintance, her faithful wilderness had swallowed her up. Only the veery’s song, farther away and fainter; only the aeolian tones about him; only the feeling of vanished music and uncaptured song.
Fresh colors after rain now blended where she had been. And still he stood among them, gazing, trying to comprehend the treasure he had found. Thus the miner turns in his eager fingers the crystal that puzzles him, and calls it blende, the thing that deceives.
He had not asked her name. He had made a supreme discovery, and the name was unimportant.
For his predicament there are names enough, ancient and mostly unbelieved. We might say that he had fallen head over heels in love, except that she was not a butt of malmsey or a hollow tree full of honey. We might say that the minute she met him she pursed up his heart, except that she was not in the habit of carrying a purse. At first sight they had changed eyes, but what would that mean in terms of electricity?
To be soberly modern we might say that he had yielded as easily as zinc yields its electrons to copper, plating it round and defending it forever. But the trouble is that Marvin had forgotten all his chemistry.
There he stood, a man of lightning without one word of lightning at his command. There he stood, compounded of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, sodium, magnesium, silicon, phosphorus, sulphur, chlorine, potassium, calcium, iron, and iodine, and not one element had a characteristic thing to say.