“Now!”—she gulped it down. “Now I am a common mill girl.”
She had been walking rapidly down the road toward the house. So rapidly that she did not know how flushed and beautiful she had become. She was swinging her hat impatiently in her hand, her fine hair half falling and loose behind, shadowing her face as rosy sunset clouds the temple on Mt. Ida. A face of more classic beauty, a skin of more exquisite fairness, flushed with the bloom of youth, Richard Travis had never before seen.
And so, long before she reached him, he reined in his trotters and sat silently watching her come. What a graceful step she had—what a neck and head and hair—half bent over with eyes on the ground, unconscious of the beauty and grace of their own loveliness.
She almost ran into his buggy—she stopped with a little start of surprise, only to look into his clean-cut face, smiling half patronizingly, half humorously, and with a look of command too, and of patronage withal, of half-gallant heart-undoing.
It was the look of the sharp-shinned hawk hovering for an instant, in sheer intellectual abandon and physical exuberance, above the unconscious oriole bent upon its morning bath.
He was smiling down into her eyes and repeating half humorously, half gallantly, and altogether beautifully, she thought, Keats' lines:
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams and health and
Quiet breathing....”
Even Helen could not tell how it was done nor why she had consented....
“No—no—you are hot and tired and you shall not walk.... I will give you just a little spin before Mammy Maria calls you to dinner.... Yes, Lizzette and Sadie B. always do their best when a pretty girl is behind them.”
How refreshing the air—hot and tired as she was. And such horses—she had never before ridden behind anything so fine. How quickly he put her at her ease—how intellectual he was—how much of a gentleman. And was it not a triumph—a social triumph for her? A mill girl, in name, to have him notice her? It made her heart beat quickly to think that Richard Travis should care enough for her to give her this pleasure and at a time when—when she always saw her mother's eyes.