We would pause, where now we hasten,
We would often look around,
Lest our careless feet should trample
Some rare jewel in the ground."
It was like my extravagant nature to quote this verse of "speech day" poetry while engaged in such a commonplace pursuit, but then the age of Eve is an extravagant age.
I was in a tight little cell of a room back of the pantry, a hot enough place on an August morning; a little den where we store old magazines, last summer hats, pictures and bric-à-brac that we have outgrown, and piles of newspapers.
It was the last named species of junk that was absorbing my earnest attention, to say naught of perspiration, on the day I have in mind, which is by no means a distant one. My forehead was wet and my hair was sticking to it in damp little slabs, but I was unaware of this until afterward, when my family called my attention to it, and inquired where I had been and what I had been doing. Then I was in no mood to tell them.
"It ought to be somewhere in the June lot," I mused, as I stretched my arm across a bundle of worn-out bedroom curtains and dragged a batch of dusty papers over into my lap.
I have been very idle and lonely for the last few days, else I doubt if I should have been driven to such occupation as this. I knew it was foolish, even as I did it, but the Claybornes have been away, staying with the elder Claybornes a while, only returning this morning early, and Cousin Eunice has been so busy since then repairing the damage done Waterloo's clothes that she has been uninteresting to me. The Sullivans spent last week down in the country at a tiny town named Bayville, where there is no sign of a bay; and I have missed the workings of Neva sadly.
It denoted the recent trend of my mind that, as I thought of Neva, upon this occasion, I immediately remembered that her father is a strict anti-Appleton man. Anti-Appleton! How much the term means to me now! A week ago I cared no more for its sound than I cared for the nouns of the fifth declension.