It was at their house. Adelaide was below the porch, trimming the roses that had drooped too low. Clarice leaned over the porch railing. Quincy was to one side and unobserved. He had stepped out through the door. The two girls chatted brightly. Clarice led the conversation. She was coaxing her friend to admit that red was far more beautiful than blue. In a prim, white jumper, with Dutch neck, she bent her alert body downward. The pressure of the rail below her waist drew the frail cloth tight against her breasts. She was bending toward the left. When she laughed—which was half the time—a tremor went through her body as if it too were laughing. When she talked, she swayed gently, her whole form together, to and fro against the railing that first ate hard upon her and then gave her up. In this way the fluted railing spokes marked out their pattern against her body. Her right knee was forward and her right foot dangled. This gave accent to her rhythm. The discovered leg with its black silk stockings, pointed with tiny, white-canvas slippers, was straight and strong and fleshless. It cut like a tangent movement to the misty sway of her body. And here, Quincy kept his eyes enchanted. In the slow, steady rhythm of her body, to and fro against the railing, while her words sparked brightly, there seemed a faint, voluptuous deliberation. Her voice was a moist crystal. The nape of her neck was a nook with tiny and bronzed ringlets. He did not see her face. But now, in the pause, the girl’s subtle sense came into play. She felt him there; she straightened and turned toward him. And their eyes met.
Both of them felt the burn of their blushing. With a soft hand, Clarice smoothed her skirt in front from the waist down—slowly. It had been very faintly ruffled. But the fact that her consciousness was there, drove Quincy’s eyes to her face, though in his quandary they had once more fallen. He did not know how to take them entirely away.
At that moment, it came about that he discovered it unjust to call Clarice merely pretty.
With a sudden fervor, he had said to her: “Will you go walking with me, tomorrow?”
She had given one peal of laughter, grown serious and between the two states, replied: “Why—of course, I will!”
But if their walks, that summer, through the woods were so many wild-flowers, they were of the sort that onrushing youth could not stop to contemplate. Quincy deemed commendably mature the dispassionate way in which he set out to take Clarice. They were to be simply friends, and perhaps they might bring good to one another. The boy was sure that, had she known, his mother would have approved his conduct. But the doubting Sarah had no insight into his calm. Her eyes grew cloudy and troubled when his walks with Clarice became engrossingly frequent. On one occasion she said to him:
“Are there no young men about for you to play with?”
Quincy had seen the young men in the town’s post-office, and at the soda fountains. They were a typical group—shallow-eyed, and narrow-headed, with the manners of fox-terriers and the souls also—probably. They were the sort of boys who instinctively stiffened their necks when Quincy was about. There were no other boys—Clarice’s brother was fourteen. So Quincy’s mother should have been less fearful of this new friendship.
Adelaide found a way to express her view of it.
“Clarice is a child—a dear child,” she fell into repeating. She seemed to believe that childhood was a race. One who was once a child would remain one always. Never could the chance be admitted that there exist in Clarice at seventeen, things which would one day grow like Adelaide at twenty-one. Perhaps, Adelaide was right Perhaps, childhood is a generic quality. But, howsoever, from the days of Quincy’s absorption, there was a barrier between the girls.