"My young master will give me permission, and we can slip off from Old Miss. Let us go Sunday, after dinner?"
This was on a Saturday, and the length of time lying dead between then and Sunday afternoon was to me a sunless, moonless and starless age. But the hour, the minute came, and amidst the half contemptuous titterings and envious glances of the negroes, we drove off from the gate, down a lane, far across two white turn-pikes that streaked a hill and striped a valley, up through a fern cove to a dark, mysterious spring; and here we left the buggy to climb a crag. She had seen red lumps of sand-stone, but never had she touched a living rock, and at the foot of a cliff, moss-grown and vine-strung, she stood with her head bowed and with her red cap in her hand—a goddess in meditation, a nymph at prayer. I stood apart and in deep reverence looked at her, fearful that my nearness might profane her devotions. I had begun to ascribe to her a super-human quality, a beauty belonging not to this world, and a virtue breathed by the ancient maidens who preferred death to a tarnishment of their chastity. Indeed, had there been such an institution as the supreme bench of sentimental idiots, I should surely have been selected to a seat upon it.
"Is it not divine here, in this air, blown fresh from paradise?" I said, lifting my eyes like an ox.
"Yes, and I wish we had brought something to eat," she replied. "This rough climbing has made me hungry."
"You hungry!" I cried. "Impossible."
"Why impossible?" And she put on her red cap and looked at me from head to foot.
"Because your soul—"
"Bosh!" she said and laughed. "All you Kentucky men are alike, from what I have read and from what I now see. You try to make love and you declaim like school-boys. They laugh at such love in New Orleans. Don't you know that the first step toward making love to a woman is to interest her by something you do or say?"
"And haven't I interested you?" I asked.
"Why, I can't say that you have. You have been very kind, and attentive, but I haven't seen anything surprising about you. Ever since I came I have heard how smart you were, and I suppose you must have lorded it over those poor ignorant negroes."