Bessie looked surprised. "Of course; we're going out, aren't we?"
"But quickly," urged John, "just a mad impulse, just a romantic impulse; the feeling that I want to get you out of doors. You are like a flower to me, just bursting into beautiful bloom. Better still, a wonderful fruit, which in some sheltered spot has grown unplucked to a rich tinted ripeness. You are so much a part of nature, so utterly unartificial, that it seems I must see you and enjoy you first in a setting of nature's own."
This was the frankest acknowledgment of her beauty and its appeal to him that John had ever made. It seemed to Bessie that he made it now rather unconsciously; but she saw that he felt it and was moved by it. To see this gave her another delicious thrill of happiness. Indeed her girlish breast was all a-tremble with joys, with curiosities, with expectancies. She, too, felt something wonderful and intoxicating in this slight physical contact of her lover's fingers. She felt herself upon the verge of new and mysterious discoveries and recognized the naturalness of the instinct to meet them under the vaulted blue with the warm sun shining and the tonic breezes blowing past.
"Your impulse is right, John," Bessie answered, with quick assent and an energetic double shake of the hands that held her own, and they went out into the sunny street.
Not far from the Mitchell residence, on the western hills of Los Angeles, is a little, painted park, with a maple-leaf sheet of water embanked by closely shaved terraces of green, and once or twice a clump of shrubbery crouching so close over graveled walks as to suggest the thrill of something wild. From one of these man-made thickets a toy promontory juts into the lake. Upon this point, as if it were a lighthouse, is a rustic house, octagonal in shape, with benches upon its inner circumference. Embowered at the back, screened half way on the sides, and with the open lake before, this snug structure affords a delicious sense of privacy and elfin-like seclusion, provided there be no oarsmen pulling lazily or tiny sailboat loafing across the watery foreground.
This day there was none. The stretch of lake in front stared vacantly. The birds twittered in the boughs behind, unguardedly. The perfume of jasmine or orange blossoms or honeysuckle or of love was wafted through the rustic lattices; and here John and Bessie, seated side by side, were able to feel themselves alone in the universe.
But it was so delightful just to have each other thus alone and know that at any moment the great words so long preparing might be spoken, that instinctively they postponed the blissful moment of avowal, with vagrant talk on widely scattered subjects. Indeed, it seemed to each that any word the other spoke was music, and anything was blissful that engaged their minds in mutual contemplation. But nearer and nearer to themselves the subjects of conversation drew until they talked of their careers.
John, they agreed, was going to be something big,—very, very big; though he still did not know what, and in the meantime he was going to make money, yet not for money's sake.
As for Bessie, she, too, had developed an ambition and surprised John into delightful little raptures with her statement of it.
"This country has been keeping bachelor's hall long enough," she dogmatized, placing one slim finger affirmatively in the center of one white palm. "Women are going to have more to do with government. Here in California we'll be voting in a few years. When it comes, John, I'm going to be ready for it."