“I know. That’s what Pa’s always sayin’! And—and—everybody. I wish I wasn’t!”
“Here I let you kiss me as much as you want and you make me feel as if I was doin’ sumpin’ wicked. Nathan Forge—I’m mad! I never want to speak to you again!”
“Aw, don’t be mad, Bernie. I didn’t mean nothin’! Honest!”
“Mother always said you were a yokel. I don’t know what it means but you are one, all right.”
Under her exasperation the Dresden Doll was furious. She had lowered the lattice of her modesty and knew it perfectly. A crass boy was vaguely sounding a warning.
The quarrel was patched up somehow and they ate their lunch, at least they ate Bernie’s lunch. For when the Dresden Doll removed the cover from her dainty repast, an awful qualm smote Nathan at the coarseness of his own. With the subtlety of a boy, Nathan managed to push his package off the bank into the brook. When Bernie squealed a warning, the boy fell clumsily in his efforts to recover. So it floated away downstream, out of sight and certainly out of the possibility of humiliating mastication. Thereat Nathan affected to be both regretful and indifferent. He declared he could subsist till supper without luncheon. The Israelites fasted for forty days, didn’t they, and remained alive? But Bernie prevailed upon him that she had enough in her basket for half a dozen boys. So they ate their meal together, eyes averted.
It was early afternoon when the girl suddenly cried:
“Do you know what I’d like to do? For once in my life without Mother to say ‘Shocking! Shocking!’ I’d like to paddle in this brook as if I was common, and like vulgar children.”
“You might fall in and get your clothes wet and have to go home all drenched and slithery.”
“But you could take off your shoes and stockings and let me hold your hand!”