Below her lay Whitewater Farms, neat as a group of newly-painted toys, house, barns with their hip-gables, silos, poultry-runs, sheds, out-buildings, whitewashed fences.
A mile south, buried among elms and maples, lay White Hills Village, the spires of its three churches piercing the foliage.
All around, east, west, south, rose low hills, patched with woods, a barn or two in silhouette on some grassy ridge. Ploughed fields, pastures, squares of vivid winter wheat checkered the panorama, the tender green of hard-wood groves alternating with the dark beauty of hemlock and white pine.
Overhead a blue sky, quite cloudless; over all, May sunshine; the young world melodious with the songs of birds. And Eris, twenty, with the heart and experience of sixteen.
Sweet, thrilling came the meadow lark’s calling from the crests of tall elms. It seemed to pierce her heart.
To the breezy stillness of the hill came faintly out of the valley the distant barking of a dog, a cock-crow, answered, answered again from some remoter farm.
Eris turned and looked into the north, where bluish hills spread away into the unknown.
Below her were the Home Woods, where Whitewater Brook ran over silver gravel, under mossy logs, pouring into deep, spreading pools, gliding swiftly amid a camouflage of ferns, gushing out over limestone beds to clatter and sparkle and fling rainbow spray across every sunny glade.
Eris looked down at the woods. To venture down there was not very good for her low-heeled, white sport shoes.... Of course she could clean them after noon dinner and they’d be dry in time for—anything.... But for what?
She paused at the wood’s edge, her mind on her shoes.