The fragrance from the pink-hearted laurel and the locust bloom had no delicacy more subtle or provocative than that of her cheeks and hair. The breeze in the nodding poplar tops seemed scarcely freer or lighter than her movements. Like the season she was young and in blossom and like the hills she was wild of beauty.
Spurrier admitted to himself that, were he free to respond to the pagan and vital promptings of impulse, instead of standing pledged to rigid and austere purposes, this girl would have made something ring within him as a tuning fork rings to its note.
Since the days of Augusta Beverly’s ascendency, he had never felt the need of raising any sort of defense between himself and a woman. At first he had believed himself, with youthful resentment, a woman-hater and more latterly he had become in this, as in other affairs, an expedientist. Augusta had proven weak in loyalty, under stress, and Vivian had been indifferent to the ostracism of his former comrades so long as her own aristocracy of money accepted him. Both had been snobs in a sense, and in a sense he too was a snob.
But because this girl was of a simplicity that regarded all things in their primary colors and nothing in the shaded half-tones of politer usage, it was needful to guard against her mistaking his proffered comradeship for the attitude of the lover—and that would 117 have been most disastrous. It would have made necessary awkward explanations that would wound her, embarrass him and arouse the old man’s just ire. For people, he was learning, may be elementally uncouth and yet prouder than Lucifer, and except when he was here on their own ground there was no common meeting place between their standards of living.
Yet Glory’s presence was like a gypsy-song to his senses; rich and lyrical with a touch of the plaintive. Glory, he knew, would have believed in him when Augusta Beverly had doubted, and would have stood fast when Augusta had cut loose.
This was the sort of thought with which it was dangerous to dally—and perhaps that was precisely why, under this tuneful sky, it pleased him to humor it. Certainly, whatever the cause, the sight of her made him step more elastically as she went on ahead.
When they had whipped the streams for trout until hunger clamored, Spurrier sat, with a sandwich in his hand in grass that waved knee-high, and through half closed lids watched Glory as she moved about crooning an old ballad, and seemingly unconscious of himself, herself and all but the sunlit spirit of the early summer day.
“Glory,” he said suddenly, calling her by her given name for the first time and in a mood of experiment.
As naturally as though she had not noted his lapsed formality, she turned toward him and answered in kind.
“What air hit, Jack?”