CHAPTER XXV THE END OF SUMMER
Outside all was wind, rain, confusion and destruction. Occasionally a bough came crashing down to earth and always the branches of the great tree beside Maida’s window, rubbed against the house. The wind veered and whirled. One moment the rain was coming, like a shower of bullets, against the window of one side; the next it was lashing, like a bundle of twigs, against the glass of another.
Inside was warmth, light, laughter and conversation. The older children sat about the big fireplace in the living room. Rosie was on her knees there, busily wielding a corn popper. Beside her sat Laura toasting macaroons on the end of a long fork. Silva and Maida were bringing in great pans of molasses candy which simply refused to cool. The boys were fanning it in an effort to bring it to the tasting point. The little children were running about, looking at books, or playing games, according to their tastes, perfectly confident, as ever, that the relentless hour of eight o’clock could be put off this one evening. Mrs. Dore, quite herself again, was rocking Delia who had given way to premature fatigue. In the midst of all this excitement Granny Flynn read tranquilly from her Lives of the Saints.
“I can’t believe the summer is over,” Rosie exclaimed suddenly. “I won’t believe it! Oh why can’t things like this go on for ever?”
“I couldn’t believe it either,” Laura declared, “until this storm came. The weather has been so warm up to now that I wouldn’t believe autumn had come. But to-day and yesterday have been fallish.”
“Autumn’s here,” Silva said, “when the goldenrod and asters come.”
“I know it,” Maida agreed mournfully. “How glad I am when flowers come and how sorry I am when they go! It makes you know that summer is flying just to watch them disappear. If the flowers only stayed after they came, you wouldn’t notice it so much. But they don’t. They go—first the dandelions and then the violets; and then the daisies and buttercups and wild roses and iris; then the elderberry and sumach; and then the goldenrod and asters. But as soon as each one of these stops blooming, you realize that that part of the summer is gone. And as soon as you see the red rose hips—” she twisted her hand through the long necklace of crimson berries that she was wearing, “—then you know that the fall has begun.”
“I never thought of that before,” Laura exclaimed. “Wouldn’t it be perfectly beautiful if they stayed until the end of the summer, even the dandelions? Perhaps there wouldn’t be room for them all though.”
“This storm makes me think of fall all right,” Arthur said.