"If I told you, you wouldn't believe it. I don't want a thing I haven't got—not a single thing. On a day like this everything is mine—that long piece of woods over there—black against the blue sky—and the creek underfoot—I couldn't ask for a single other thing!"
"But there must be a goal you want to reach—everybody has that."
"Oh, you're talking about to-morrow! and this is to-day. And sufficient unto the day is the joy thereof. If I ever told anybody what I mean to do to-morrow, it would be spoiled. I'm full of dark secrets that I never tell any one."
"But you might tell me—I'm the best possible person to tell secrets to."
"I can't be sure of that, when I hardly know you at all."
"That's mighty cruel, you know, when I feel as though I had known you always."
He tried to throw feeling into this, but the time and place and her vigorous strides over the ice did not encourage sentiment.
"You oughtn't to tell girls that you feel you have known them always. It isn't complimentary. You ought to express sorrow that they are so difficult to know and play the card that you hope by great humility and perseverance one day to know them. That is the line I should take if I were a man."
He laughed at this. There were undoubted fastnesses in her nature that were not easily attainable. She seemed to him amazingly mature in certain ways, and in others she was astonishingly childlike.
"They say you're a genius; that you're going to do wonderful things," he said.