“Pelleas!” I cried finally, “you don’t believe it either!”
“Ah, well, no,” he admitted, “I don’t know that I do.”
XII
AN INTERLUDE
We saw Mrs. Trempleau once afterward—it was the following Autumn in the Berkshires—and of that time I must turn aside to tell. But the story is of Mrs. Trempleau’s little girl, Margaret.
Pelleas and I had gradually come to admit that Margaret knew many things of which we had no knowledge. This statement may very well be received either as proof of our madness or as one of the pastimes of our age; but we are reconciled to having both our pastimes and our fancies disregarded. We were certain that there are extensions of the experiences of every day which we missed and little Margaret understood.
This occurred to us the first time that we saw her. We were sitting on the veranda of a boarding house where we were come with Miss Willie Lillieblade to be her guests for a week. The boarding house was kept by a Quakeress, as famous for her asters as for her pasties. Mrs. Trempleau, who was there when we arrived (“She is like a flash of something, would thee not say?” observed the gentle Quakeress, “and she calls the child only, thee will have marked, ‘Run away now, Dearness.’”)—Mrs. Trempleau had just driven away in a high trap with orange wheels and a slim blond youth attached, when Margaret came up to the veranda from the garden.
“Smell,” she said to me.
As I stooped over the wax-white scentless blossoms in the child’s hand, I thought of that chorus of the flower girls in one of the Italian dramas: “Smell! Smell! Smell!”
“What are they, dear?” I asked, taking care not to shake her confidence by looking at her.