He drew a box of chocolates from his pocket and tossed it over to her. She caught it neatly on her outstretched palm, as a boy would have done, and nibbled squirrel-like as she talked. She did not resent being teased by Amiel—she liked it, rather, as representing a perfect understanding between them. Also, once removed from the high hills of romance, she was not devoid of humor.
"It was cut in June—before you came. They didn't want me to, but I just begged them. It was such a nuisance bathing and then flopping about drying afterward, and being sent upstairs all day long to make it smooth."
"You funny kid," he said. "You don't care how you look, do you? You ought to have been a boy. What have you been doing down here all by yourself?"
"Reading—and—listening," said Dorothea vaguely. She folded Godey's Lady Book tightly to her chest. Lady Ursula or no Lady Ursula, she would have died—with black, bitter shame at the thought of any eye but her own falling upon the penciled lines therein. The horror of ridicule is the black shadow that hangs over youth. That strange, inner world of her own Dorothea shared with nothing more substantial than her dreams.
"Listening?" he inquired.
"To the ocean," explained Dorothea. "It was high tide when I came down, and the waves boom-boomed like that, as though it were saying big words down in its chest, you know."
"And what were the wild waves saying?"
"Oh, big words like—" she thought a moment, her small, sunburnt face serious and intent. "Oh, like
"Robert of Sicily, Brother of Pope Urbane
And Valmond, Emperor of Allemaine."
she intoned deeply. "You see?"