Watts, his dark face turned on the others, looked inquiringly. "The same as Athens under Pericles, I suppose?" he questioned. "The great souls come and go and agonize and cry in the wilderness, and the little souls determine what shall be." He held out his hand once more and the other gripped it.
"You talk like a man-Cassandra," the cashier grumbled, "but I'm coming up on your old mountain top to hear some more of your wild stuff."
As Shipman passed down the bank steps he saw the Bogart car sail by and the two tams, the red and the blue, bobbed gaily at him. "See you at the dance next Saturday." It was Minga who called this carelessly. It was the same Minga who a few nights ago on the mountain top had told Watts Shipman she hated him. Now her vivid face framed in its blowing curls looked calm appreciation. The Bunch were "for" Watts; also the big club dance was in the air; her instinct for collecting partners bade her forget the cigarette episode. Watts, while he raised his eyebrows, gestured enthusiastically. Sard also waved her hand, and the flash of her deep eyes got to the man in a way she might not have intended. For a moment he stood and looked after them down the principal little street of Morris. It was the blue tam-o'-shanter that still filled his vision.
"Blue ran the flash across," he quoted thoughtfully. But it was not of blue violets that the great lawyer was thinking; it was of personality, of personality that was like a flame, flashing across dullness and smugness and cheap pride, to what cost? Watts Shipman, climbing to his mountain top, questioned, for no man knew better than he the painful cost of honest personality.
CHAPTER XIII
PEARS AND POETRY
Out toward the rear of the Judge's place there were garden paths set about with horny fruit trees. A small plot of low-growing vegetables; a strip of turf and a square of bean poles, made a jungle of kitchen produce. As the season advanced, early summer pears of a soft yellow, rosy-cheeked sort, began to hang in globules on the gray-flaked trees. Here Colter sometimes worked under the Judge's snapped comments, or sat at luncheon hour, preferring to eat here rather than in the comfortable kitchen; and here, because of its almost jungle-like inaccessibility, Sard, wandering from the house, would sometimes sit in the long slumberous grasses and read. No one else cared much for the vegetable plot nor for the yellow pears. Miss Aurelia stayed away on the ground of wasps; the Judge found that the grass ruined his highly polished boots; the cook and the waitresses had prejudices connected with snakes, but Sard wondered if the "man on the place" ever saw, as she, lying on her back, sometimes saw, the romance of this nook. The tent of the blue sky, the silken whir of birds winging through, the syncopatic throb of life in the grass all around, the Dervish-like attitude of the old trees holding in faithful remembrance of youth and blossoms their honey-filled pots of gold.
It was at the noon hour that the two girls came to pick up windfalls. They waded through the long grass lamenting the great dark bruises on the soft pear shapes.