“You have confessed to yards of verses,” she began, gathering up a handful of sand which she let slip through her fingers lingeringly, catching the grains in her palm. “I’ve seen—about a yard of them.”
Clearly flirtation was not one of his accomplishments. His “Oh, I’ve scattered them round rather freely,” ignored a chance to declare gracefully that she had been the inspiration of those lyrics, written in a perfectly legible hand on onion-skin letter-sheets, that were concealed in her sleeve. His indifference to the opening she had made for him piqued her. She was quite dashed by the calm tone in which he added, with no hint of sidling or simpering:—
“I’ve written reams of poems about you.” (He might as well have said that he had scraped the ice off her sidewalk or carried coal into her cellar, for all the thrill she derived from his admission.) “I hope you won’t be displeased; but when I was ranging the lake last September we seemed to find the same haunts and to be interested in the same sort of thing, and it kept me busy dodging you, I can tell you! I exhausted the Classical Dictionary finding names for you; and it wasn’t any trouble at all to make verses about you. I was really astonished to find how necessary you were to the completion of my pen-and-ink sketches of all this,”—a wave of the arm placed the lake shores in evidence,—“I liked you best in action; when the spirit moved you to run or drive your canoe over the water. You do all the outdoor things as though you had never done anything else; it’s a joy to watch you! I was sitting on a fence one day over there in Mrs. Waring’s orchard and you ran by,—so near that I could hear the swish of your skirts,—and you made a high jump for a bough and shook down the apples and ran off laughing like a boy afraid of being caught. I pulled out my notebook and scribbled seven stanzas on that little incident.”
Any admiration that was conveyed by these frankly uttered sentences was of the most impersonal sort conceivable. She was not used to being treated in this fashion. Even his manner of asking her pardon for his temerariousness in apostrophizing her in his verses had lacked, in her critical appraisement of it, the humility a self-respecting young woman had a right to demand of a young poet who observes her without warrant, is pleased to admire her athletic prowess, her ways and her manners, and puts her into his verses as coolly as he might pick a flower from the wayside and wear it in his coat.
“Then you used me merely to give human interest to your poems; any girl running through Mrs. Waring’s orchard and snatching at the apples would have done just as well?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t say that,” he replied, unabashed; “but even the poorest worm of a scribbler has to have an ideal and you supplied mine. You were like a model who strolls along just when it occurs to the painter that his landscape needs a figure to set it off. You don’t mind, I hope?”
This made it necessary for her to assure him in as few words as possible that she didn’t in the least object to his view of the matter; and she added, not without a trace of irony, that she was always glad to be of use; that if she could further the cause of art in any way she was ready to do it.
“Please don’t; that hurt a little! By the way, the Poet told me I ought to know you. He recommended you in the noblest terms. I see now what was in his mind; he thought I needed your gentle chastening.”
“It’s more likely he thought it well for you to see your ideal shattered! It’s too bad, for the sake of your ambitions, that I didn’t remain just an unknown girl in an orchard—who suggested Pomona inspecting her crops and then vanished forever.”
“Oh, I had to know you; it was inevitable,” he replied with irritating resignation. “You see I’ve written about you in prose, too; you’ve been immensely provocative and stimulating. My best prose, as well as my only decent jingles, has had you for a subject. I laid myself out to describe you at the tennis tournament last fall. Next to watching you run through an orchard trippingly, like one of Swinburne’s long lines, I like you best when you show your snappy stroke with the racket and make a champion look well to her knitting.”