"It's hard to get a rig on Sunday," she said, "Everybody takes them all out in the morning. I think you were awfully lucky to get such a good one. Isn't it a lovely day?"
"It looks like the rains are about over," he replied in a polite voice. After the first radiant glance they had not looked at each other. He chirped to the sorrel, and they drove away together.
Enveloped in the hood of the buggy-top, they saw before them the yellow road, winding on among the trees, disappearing, appearing again like a ribbon looped about the curves of the hills. There was gold in the green of the fields, gold in the poppies beside the road, gold in the ruddiness of young apricot twigs. The clear air itself was filled with vibrant, golden sunshine. They drove in a golden haze. What did they say? It did not matter. They looked at each other.
His arm lay along the back of the buggy-seat. Its being there was like a secret shared between them, a knowledge held in common, to be cherished and to be kept unspoken. When the increasing consciousness of it grew too poignant to be borne any longer in silence they escaped from it in sudden mutual panic, breathless. They left the buggy, tying the patient sorrel in the shade beneath a tree, and clambered up the hillside.
They went, they said, to gather wild flowers. He took her hand to help her up the trail, and she permitted it, stumbling, when unaided she could have climbed more easily, glad to feel that he was the leader, eager that he should think himself the stronger. At the top of the hill they came to a low-spreading live-oak with a patch of young grass beneath it, and here, forgetting the ungathered flowers, they sat down.
They sat there a long time, talking very seriously on grave subjects; life and the meaning of it, the bigness of the universe, and how it makes a fellow feel funny, somehow, when he looks at the stars at night and thinks about things. She understood. She felt that way herself sometimes. It was amazing to learn how many things they had felt in common. Neither of them had ever expected to find any one else who felt them, too.
Then there was the question of what to do with your life. It was a pretty important thing to decide. You didn't want to make mistakes, like so many men did. You had to start right. That was the point, the start. When you get to be eighteen or so, almost twenty, you realize that, and you look back over your life and see how you've wasted a lot of time already. You realize you better begin to do something.
Now here was the idea of learning telegraphy. That looked pretty good. If a fellow really went at that and worked hard, there was no telling what it might lead to. You might get to be a train-dispatcher or even a railroad superintendent. There were lots of big men who didn't have any better start than he had. Look at Edison.
She agreed. She was sure there was nothing he could not do. Somehow, then, they began to talk as if she would be with him. She might be a telegrapher, too. Wouldn't it be fun if she was, so they could be in the same town? He'd help her with the train orders, and if he worked nights she could fix his lunch for him.
They made a sort of play of it, laughing about it. They were only supposing, of course. They carefully refrained from voicing the thought that clamored behind everything they said, that set her heart racing and kept her eyes from meeting his, the thought of that young couple at Rollo.