“Perfect,” he answered. He continued to stare at her for a moment and then said suddenly in a low voice,
“Good heavens, how you’ve changed! It’s a little over a year now that I’ve known you and you’re an entirely different person from the girl with the short hair I met up at Foleys. What have you done to yourself? What is it that has changed you?”
“I think it’s because I’m happy,” she said, beginning again to pick the wild flowers.
“Why are you happy?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I—” she paused and began to arrange her flowers in a careful bunch.
He suddenly dropped his eyes to the ground and there was a silence. The sleepy murmur of insects rose upon it. The sun, in an effort to penetrate the inclosure, scattered itself in intermittent flickerings of brilliant light that shifted in golden spots along the tree trunks or came diluted through the webbing of twigs and vine tendrils. It was still very hot and the balsamic odors of bay-tree and pine seemed to grow more intense with the passing of the hour.
“You were such a quiet little thing up there,” Jerry went on, “working like a man in that garden of yours and never wanting to go anywhere. Things down here may have made you happy, but I sometimes wonder if they haven’t made you frivolous, too.”
When Jerry ceased staring at her and began to talk in this familiar, half-bantering strain, she felt more at ease, less uncomfortable and conscious. She seized the opening with eagerness and said, smiling down at her little bouquet:
“But you know I am frivolous. I love parties and pretty clothes and lots of money to spend, and all the good times going. I was that way at Foleys, only I didn’t have any of those things. I can be serious, too, if it’s necessary. When I haven’t got the things to be frivolous with, I can do without.”
He stretched out his hand and plucked a long stalk of feather-headed grass.