Having acquired knowledge, the true student seeks to demonstrate. Dorothea had promptly and intentionally fallen in love with the son of her next-door neighbor. Amiel—fresh from his first year in college— was a tall, broad-shouldered youth, with kindly brown eyes and a flash of white teeth when he smiled. In contrast to the small boys and the sober-going fathers of families in which the summer colony abounded, he shone, as Dorothea's favorite novelists would have expressed it, "like a Greek god."
It was this unsuspecting person whom Dorothea had, at first sight, elected to be the Hero of her Dreams. She trailed him, moreover, with a persistency that would have done credit to a detective. Did he go to the post-office, he was sure to meet Dorothea returning (Lady Ursula, strolling through her estate, comes upon her lover unawares). Dorothea, emulating her heroine's example by vaulting a fence and cutting across lots, could be found also strolling (if slightly breathless) as he approached.
She timed her day, as far as possible, with his. Would he swim, play tennis, or go crabbing—there was Dorothea. Would he repose in the summerhouse hammock and listen to entire pages declaimed from Tennyson and Longfellow, the while being violently swung—his slave was ready. She read no story in which she was not the heroine and Amiel the hero. At the same time, she was perfectly and painfully conscious in the back of her brain that Amiel regarded her only as a sun-browned, crop-headed tomboy, who had an extraordinary facility for remembering all the poetry she had ever read, and who amused and interested him as his own small sister might. Outwardly she kept strictly to this role—a purely natural one—while inwardly she soared dizzily from fantasy to fantasy, even while her physical body was plunging in the waves or leaping on the tennis court.
Could Amiel have had the slightest insight into the fancies seething in his small neighbor's mind, he would have been astounded to the verge of doubting her reason. Little did he know, as he stood now on the bulkhead and looked down at her, that at the moment Dorothea was finishing mentally a poem in which with "wild tears" and "clasping hands," he had bidden her an eternal farewell—by moonlight. She was, moreover, perturbed by the paucity of her native language. There appeared to be nothing to rhyme with "love" except "shove," "above," and "dove." Of these one was impossible and two were trite. Scowling fiercely at the ocean, she finally gave the bird to the hungry line and repeated the final couplet doubtfully:
" `Farewell,' he said. `Ah, love, my love,
My heart is breaking for thee, Dove.' "
"Look out!" said a voice above her. "I'm going to jump."
Dorothea sat up delightedly, with her bare, brown legs tucked
beneath her, Turk-like, as she welcomed him. ("Ah! Beloved," said
Lady Ursula with her hand on her fluttering heart.) "Hello," said
Dorothea, with a wide grin.
He flung himself down beside her and surveyed her with amusement. "Been digging holes with your head?" he asked affably. "Your hair and eyelashes look it. Been here all the afternoon?"
"Yes," she said. "I saw you go riding after lunch. I've been here ever since. I love to be on the beach when there isn't a lot of people bothering around. Then"—she made a wide gesture with her brown hand— "all of it seems to belong to me, not broken up in little bits for everybody." She shook her cropped head vigorously, and the sand pelted down her shoulders.
"Well," he said, watching this operation, "you came near taking your little bit to the house with you to keep, didn't you? How long have you worn your hair cropped like that, Dorothea? Was it when you decided to be captain of a ball team?"