He talked to her as he would with Rose, about "farrer cows" and other commonplaces of stock-raising to which Rose would have listened abstractedly or with a slight feeling of disgust. To Josie it was deeply fascinating, and just a little bit like reading a forbidden book. It affected her a little unwholesomely, just as it would have made Ed, the hand, spasmodically guffaw to stand before the Venus de Milo—use and custom do much.
She sometimes asked questions which she would not have dared to ask her uncle, for John Dutcher was beyond sex; indeed, he had always been a man of pure heart and plain speech. He was even in youth perfectly free from any sensuality, and now in his later middle life sex was a fact like the color of a horse or a squash, and all that pertained to it he talked of, on the same plane. It did not occur to him that he was going beyond the lines of propriety in explaining to this delicate little woman various vital facts of stock-raising.
Josie sometimes went back to Rose smilingly, and told her what had taken place.
"Why didn't you ask me—you little goose? I never thought you didn't know those things. We farm girls know all that when we are toddlers. We can't help it."
All this should have been tonic, thoroughly wholesome to the dainty over-bred girl, and so it ultimately became, though it disturbed her at the time.
The two girls went out into the meadows and upon the hills almost daily. They sought wild strawberries in the sunny spots amid the hazel brush. They buried themselves in the hay in the field and climbed on the huge loads with John and rode to the barn. They drank water out of the spring lying flat on the ground; Rose showed how it was done. They went up on the hillsides under the edges of great ledges of water-washed sandstone where Rose had made her playhouse in her childhood, and she drew forth from the crevices in the rocks the queer little worn pieces of rock which she had called horses and cows and soldiers.
Rose had not been so girlish since her first vacation from school in Madison. She romped and laughed with the ever-joyous Josie, and together they grew brown and strong. But there came into the lusty splendid joy of these days hours of almost sombre silence and dreaming. It all ended in nothing, this attempt at amusement.
Here in the riant and overflowing opulence of July, time without love's companionship was time wasted. Of what avail these soft winds, the song of birds, the gleam and lift and shimmer of leaves, if love were not there to share it?
Josie frankly confessed the name of the one she wished to share it with, but Rose looked into the sky and remained silent. Her soul was still seeking, restless, avid, yet evermore discerning, evermore difficult to satisfy.
They fell into long talks on marriage, and Rose confided to her some of her deepest thoughts, though she felt each time that this little twittering sparrow was hardly capable of understanding her.