"Going an excursion on the steamboat is an idea that every man, woman, and child in New Plymouth has had for the last century."
Ethan smiled.
"Shall I read to you?"
"You don't want to talk?"
She had some ado not to cry, but she kept saying to herself: "Silly! silly! silly!"
"I don't mind," he answered; but he walked about the room looking at Aunt Valeria's atrocities, and naturally, Val said to herself, growing grave. How he had laughed down on the veranda!
In a couple of days she had shaken off her cold sufficiently to go on the river with Julia's party. Although it was little pleasure to Val, she offered no slightest objection to this excursion or to the second "up river."
But although no one noticed anything amiss, the days were bringing her an acute disquiet. She saw clearly that Julia was not in love with Tom Scherer, and she saw further. A new sense came to her, not altogether depressing, of life's fecund possibility for unhappiness. So many ways of going wrong, only one of going right! Well, it was very exciting.
"Is this what the story-books mean? Am I what's called jealous?" she asked herself. "Am I secretly afraid of Julia? Was Ethan right? Does even joy like ours change and pass? No, no; it will be all right to-morrow."
Although she called herself a thousand fools, and guilty of vulgar suspicions into the bargain, she presently could not rid herself of the feeling that Ethan was a little cold to her; the mere fancy that this might be so made her shrink from him, lightly evade his caress, first frustrate and then deny his tenderness.