"What!" said Bennett, alarmed; "she's never said a word to me about headaches."
"Oh, you mean Edith? I thought you meant Eleanor. Edith never had a headache in her life! Some girl, Johnny?"
"Has that just struck you?" said John.
Maurice fished some grass seeds out of the buttermilk, took a deep draught of it, and looked at his companion, lying full length on the stubble in the shadow of the oak. It came to him with a curious shock that Bennett was in love. No "calf love" this time! Just a young man's love for a young woman—sound and natural, and beautiful, and right.... "I wonder," Maurice thought, "does she know it?"
It seemed as if Johnny, puffing at his pipe, and slapping a mosquito on his lean brown hand, answered his thought:
"Edith's astonishingly young. She doesn't realize that she's grown up." There was a pause; "Or that I have."
Maurice was silent; he suddenly felt old. These two—these children!—believing in love, and in each other, were in a world of their own; a world which knew no hidden household in the purlieus of Mercer; no handsome, menacing, six-year-old child; no faded, jealous woman, overflowing with wearisome caresses! In this springtime world was Edith—vigorous, and sweet, and supremely reasonable;—and never temperamental! And this young man, loving her.... Maurice turned over on his face in the grass; but he did not kiss the earth's "perfumed garment"; he bit his own clenched fist.
He was very silent for the rest of their day in the field for one thing, they had to work at a high pitch, for then were blue-black clouds in the west! At a little after three Edith came out again, but not to help.
"I had to put on my glad rags," she said, sadly, "because some people are coming to tea. I hate 'em—I mean the rags."
Maurice stopped long enough to turn and look at her, and say, "They're mighty pretty!" And so, indeed, they were—a blue organdie, with white ribbons around the waist, and a big white hat with a pink rose in a knot of black velvet on the brim. "How's Eleanor?" he said, beginning to skewer a bale of hay on to his pitchfork.