“Oh, I’ll do that,” she assured him. “I was just writing home when you landed in. Isn’t it strange how everybody knows everybody down here, and how you keep meeting people you know—that you’ve heard about? You knew me when you saw me!”
“Yes—I’d seen your pictures.”
“Mammy hadn’t but one picture of me!” She stared at him.
“That’s so,” he thought, unused to such quick thought.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked him, looking around her. “Do you try to write all that, too—I mean this sandbar, and those willows, and that woods down there, and—the caving bank?”
“Everything,” he admitted. “See?”
He handed her the page which he had just written. Holding it in one hand—there was hardly a breath of air stirring—she read it word for word.
“Yes, that’s it!” She nodded her head. “How do you do it? I’ve just been reading—let me see, ‘... the best romance becomes dangerous if by its excitement it renders the ordinary course of life uninteresting, and—and––’ I’ve forgotten the rest of it. Could anything make this life down here—anything written, I mean—seem uninteresting?”
He looked at her without answering. What was this she was saying? What was this shanty-boat woman, this runaway wife, talking about? He was dazed at being transported so suddenly from his observations to such reflections. 86
“That’s right,” he replied, inanely. “I remember reading that—somewhere!”