Though she was as soft and flexile as a shaft of weeping willow, somehow she was like a stout spar upholding him in the deep waters of fear, and he felt most ludicrously happy when she talked nursery talk to him and cooed:
“Poor, little David baby wants its Patty to love it, doesn’t it?”
He could not answer in her language, but he felt a divinity in it, and was miserably drenched in ecstasy. And she had used his first name!
CHAPTER IV
By and by the summer sifted from the trees and ebbed from the sky. The honeymoon passed like a summer, in days and nights of hot beauty, in thunder-salvos of battle, in passions of impatient rain.
For a while the autumn was a greater splendor, a transit from a green earth starred with countless blossoms of scarlet, purple, azure, to a vast realm of gold—red gold, yellow gold, green gold, but always and everywhere gold. All Westchester was a treasure-temple of glory. Then the grandeur dulled, the gold was gilt, was only patches of gilt, was russet, was shoddy. The trees were bare. Sharp outlines of unsuspected landscape came forth like hags whose robes have dropped from their gaunt bones. The wind grew despondent. Savor went with color; hope was memory; warmth, chill.
Something mournful in the air reminded RoBards of a poem that Mr. Bryant, the editor of the Post, had written a few years before:
“The melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere;
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;