“Yes, they are,” Miss Shirley answered, looking around with a certain surprise, as if seeing them now for the first time. “So much variety of color; and that burnished look that some of them have.” The trees, far and near, were giving their tones and lustres in the low December sun.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s decidedly more refined than the autumnal coloring we brag of.”
“It is,” she approved, as with novel conviction. “The landscape is really beautiful. So nice and flat,” she added.
He took her intention, and he said, as he craned his neck out of the carryall to include the nearer roadside stretches, with their low bushes lifting into remoter trees, “It’s restful in a way that neither the mountains nor the sea, quite manage.”
“Oh yes,” she sighed, with a kind of weariness which explained itself in what she added: “It’s the kind of thing you’d like to have keep on and on.” She seemed to say that more to herself than to him, and his eyes questioned her. She smiled slightly in explaining: “I suppose I find it all the more beautiful because this is my first real look into the world after six months indoors.”
“Oh!” he said, and there was no doubt a prompting in his tone.
She smiled still. “Sick people are terribly, egotistical, and I suppose it’s my conceit of having been the centre of the universe so lately that makes me mention it.” And here she laughed a little at herself, showing a charming little peculiarity in the catch of her upper lip on her teeth. “But this is divine—this air and this sight.” She put her head out of her side of the carryall, and drank them in with her lungs and eyes.
When she leaned back again on the seat she said, “I can’t get enough of it.”
“But isn’t this old rattletrap rather too rough for you?” he asked.
“Oh no,” she said, visiting him with a furtive turn of her eyes. “It’s quite ideally what invalids in easy circumstances are advised to take carriage exercise.”