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The Mettle of the Pasture

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mamma and me, you spoke to us as though you were an indifferent suitor of mine--as though I were a suitor of yours. As soon as you were gone, mamma said to me: 'What have you been doing, Marguerite, that he should think you are in love with him--that he should treat us as though we all wished to catch him?'" "That was a mistake of your mother's. But after what had passed between us--" "No matter what had passed between us, I do not think that a _man_ would virtually tell a girl's mother on her: a boy might." He grew ashen; and he took his hand out of his pockets and straightened himself from his slouchy lounging posture, and stood before her, his head in the air on his long neck like a young stag affronted and enraged. "It is true, I have sometimes been too much like a boy with you," he said. "Have you made it possible for me to be anything else?" "Then I'll make it possible for you now: to begin, I am too old to be called to account for my actions--except by those who have the right." "You mean, that I have no right--after what has passed--" "Nothing has passed between us!" "Marguerite," he said, "do you mean that you do not love me?" "Can you not see?" She was standing on the steps above him. The many-fluted parasol with its long silken fringes rested on one shoulder. Her face in the dazzling sunlight, under her hat, had lost its gayety. Her eyes rested upon his with perfect quietness. "I do not believe that you yourself know whether you love me," he said, laughing pitifully. His big mouth twitched and his love had come back into his eyes quickly enough. "Let me tell you how I know," she said, with more kindness. "If I loved you, I could not stand here and speak of it to you in this way. I could not tell you you are not a man. Everything in me would go down before you. You could do with my life what you pleased. No one in comparison with you would mean anything to me--not even mamma. As long as I was with you, I should never wish to sleep; if you were away from me, I should never wish to waken. If you were poor, if you were in trouble, you would be all the dearer to me--if you only loved me, only loved me!" Who is it that can mark down the moment when we ceased to be children? Gazing backward in after years, we sometimes attempt dimly to fix the time. "It probably occurred on that day," we declare; "it may have taken place during that night. It coincided with that hardship, or with that mastery of life." But a child can suffer and can triumph as a man or a woman, yet remain a child. Like man and woman it can hate, envy, malign, cheat, lie, tyrannize; or bless, cheer, defend, drop its pitying tears, pour out its heroic spirit. Love alone among the passions parts the two eternities of a lifetime. The instant it is born, the child which was its parent is dead. As Marguerite suddenly ceased speaking, frightened by the secret import of her own words, her skin, which had the satinlike fineness and sheen of white poppy leaves, became dyed from brow to breast with a surging flame of rose. She turned partly away from Barbee, and she waited for him to go. He looked at her a moment with torment in his eyes; then, lifting his hat without a word, he turned and walked proudly down the street toward his office. Marguerite did not send a glance after him. What can make us so cruel to those who vainly love us as our vain love of some one else? What do we care for their suffering? We see it in their faces, hear it in their speech, feel it as the tragedy of their lives. But we turn away from them unmoved and cry out at the heartlessness of those whom our own faces and words and sorrow do not touch. She lowered her parasol, and pressing her palm against one cheek and then the other, to force back the betraying blood, hurried agitated and elated into the library. A new kind of excitement filled her: she had confessed her secret, had proved her fidelity to him she loved by turning off the playmate of childhood. Who does not know the relief of confessing to some one who does not understand? The interior of the library was an immense rectangular room. Book shelves projected from each side toward the middle, forming alcoves. Seated in one of these alcoves, you could be seen only by persons who should chance to pass. The library was never crowded and it was nearly empty now. Marguerite lingered to speak with the librarian, meantime looking carefully around the room; and then moved on toward the shelves where she remembered having once seen a certain book of which she was now thinking. It had not interested her then; she had heard it spoken of since, but it had not interested her since. Only to-day something new within herself drew her toward it. No one was in the alcove she entered. After a while she found her book and seated herself in a nook of the walls with her face turned in the one direction from which she could be discovered by any one passing. While she read, she wished to watch: might he not pass? It was a very old volume, thumbed by generations of readers. Pages were gone, the halves of pages worn away or tattered. It was printed in an old style of uncertain spelling so that the period of its authorship could in this way be but doubtfully indicated. Ostensibly it came down from the ruder, plainer speech of old English times, which may have found leisure for such "A Booke of Folly." Marguerite's eyes settled first on the complete title: "Lady Bluefields' First Principles of Courting for Ye Use of Ye Ladies; but Plainly Set Down for Ye Good of Ye Beginners." "I am not a beginner," thought Marguerite, who had been in love three days; and she began to read: "_Now of all artes ye most ancient is ye lovely arte of courting. It is ye earliest form of ye chase. It is older than hawking or hunting ye wilde bore. It is older than ye flint age or ye stone aye, being as old as ye bones in ye man his body and in ye woman her body. It began in ye Garden of Eden and is as old as ye old devil himself_." Marguerite laughed: she thought Lady Bluefields delightful. "_Now ye only purpose in all God His world of ye arte of courting is to create love where love is not, or to make it grow where it has begun. But whether ye wish to create love or to blow ye little

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