Edward looked at her blankly.
“Not even a sticka gum? Why, I’ll say you’re a nice beau. I’d a feller name of Al who couldn’t never hardly hug me right away—his pockets was so fulla candies. Say, Ed, you got a lot to learn.”
Edward accepted his rôle with surprise and pleasure. Miss Weber was of the shrinking and protective type when motoring and, whenever the car, driven by rash brother Cliff, seemed unlikely to avoid disaster, Edward enjoyed feeling against his arm the stiffening and trembling of her thinly clothed body.
“Emily doesn’t know me yet,” he thought. “She has never let me show her my fine or strong side.” Miss Weber took an insignificant but pleasing part in the ranks of his sensations.
Napa Valley, like an inverted rainbow, lay before him. The strange, creased, silken bodies of the hills lay behind the glassy white veil of the air. The shadows striped and varied them, and the night-green patches of oaks, beaten almost as flat as the shadows, were crammed into the canyons. On every side, at a lower and more human level, a conventional pattern of vineyards and steepled masses of bleak eucalyptus trees was printed on the valley. The orchards were alight with the bright golden green that follows the blossom season and in their shade the grass was passionately green.
The sweet skeletons
Of orchards fire delight.
They fire into my sight
Quick rays of green and bronze.
I am pierced—I cannot bear