"—wonder if he saw us?"
"—perhaps—but what matter if he did?"
"Then I hope he's not a fellow Edenite. You have no idea what an undercurrent of gossip runs in this place."
We sank down together on a small knoll under the low-spreading branches of a live oak. We watched the man who we thought had observed our antics bobbing off down the road, as if running for exercise.
We sat quite apart, at first. Then our hands met in instinctive fondness ... met in the spirit in which we had been romping together.
"You're like a small boy, Johnnie."
"And you haven't acted so very much like a grown woman, have you, Hildreth?" It was the first time I had called her by her first name.
"Can you, or anyone else, tell me just how grown women do act? I myself don't know, yet I'm a woman."
I drew closer to her as if drawn by some attractive power. A stray wisp of her hair lit across my cheek stingingly. Then the wind blew a perfumed strand of it across my lips and over my nostrils.
It made me rub my lips, it tickled so. Hildreth noticed it.