"Oh, get up, Jack!" cried Harry Dart, whose lip had been curling in angry scorn as he watched the performance: "you are by far too good to be trodden under foot by any girl, let alone Georgy Lenox."
Georgy tripped down from her temporary throne and made Harry a little courtesy. "Do you mean to say that you would not be glad to be trodden under foot by Georgy Lenox?" she asked, laughing and tossing her curls.
He gave a contemptuous shrug: "Wait until I give you an opportunity. Floyd and I don't make fools of ourselves for any girls."
"Come, come, Harry!" said Jack, who had risen from the ground and was now wiping off the earth-stains from his clothes, "don't spoil our day by being disagreeable.—Shall we go on, Georgy?" He gave her a peculiar glance in which there was less of humility than gentle command, and she sprang after him and put her hand within his arm. He did not serve her for rewards as yet, and was used to as many blows as smiles, and this was a rare condescension on her part.
Georgy was fifteen—of the same age as Harry, but considerably younger than Jack, who was two years older than his cousin, while I was the youngest of the three. We had been playmates all our lives, and had each of us found in Georgy Lenox the only girl-friend of our boyhood. She had been a beauty from her infancy, and her wiles had grown with her growth and strengthened with her strength; and now her myriad tricks of mischief, caprice and cruelty were too closely identified with what was most bewitching in her not to have become additional charms for us. In those days, while we were still hobbledehoys, she pleased us the more that she had, with the precocity of her sex, quite outstripped us where all subtle social forces are concerned. Although she could be a hoyden still, it was quite as easy for her to assume the part of an elegant young lady, equipped for society with charming manners, a fastidious taste and indifferent ease. We occasionally laughed at her airs, but inwardly admired her superb assumptions of careless superiority: had she become timid, docile, admiring toward us, I dare say her reign would not have lasted the day out.
Harry flung his arm about me, and we followed Jack and Georgy deeper and deeper into the wood. It was the last Saturday in May, and the fairest day of the year. The thickets were full of mysterious sounds, and one could almost feel the beating of the delicate pulses of the springing, expanding life about us. I knew all the secrets of this forest, and loved no place half so well in Belfield outside of my own home. Nature, too, seemed tenderer of it than of other wildnesses, and had set the seal of her choice upon it with every gift of fern and vine and moss and lichen. No axe had invaded these solitudes for years except to prune away a too riotous undergrowth along the cart-path: the trees grew in grand natural aisles, and to look through the noble colonnade into mysterious vistas of copsewood gloom and stillness was for me to thrill with that blissful agony of youthful emotion which is our first premonition of the unreachable secret that underlies the universe.
"Did you ever think," said Harry to me earnestly, "that you would like to leave the world behind you for ever and live altogether in the woods, with only the trees and birds for company?"
But, dearly although I loved the woods, I could not answer him that I should be willing to resign my home, my mother, my friends and social joys for the life of a hermit.
"It's pleasant to see people," I suggested.
"I'm not sure of that," Harry rejoined with sudden misanthropy. "See what a hard world it is! I feel to-day like Achilles in his tent."