Vance drew a deep breath. His lips were parted, but no word came. He met Miss Spear’s smiling eyes with a vague stare. “Kubla Khan?” she said. He nodded.
“You’d never seen one of our sunrises?”
“No, only over the prairies.”
“Well, that must be rather splendid too. But very different—like seeing it over the sea.”
He made no response, for he had never seen the sea, and there was no room in his soul for more new visions.
“It’s less of an effort to see the sun rise in Illinois, I suppose?” Miss Spear continued. “You only have to look out of your window. Here it involves mountaineering, and it’s given me a mountaineer’s appetite; hasn’t it you?”
He didn’t know; he supposed so; but he hardly heard what she said. His whole sentient self was still away from him, in the blue and gold of the uprolling. He would have liked to lie down there on the edge of Thundertop between the misty splendours below and the pure light above, and let the hours drift by while the chariot of the day described its great circuit before him. At such moments he was almost disembodied.
“Come along, Vance! I’m ravening. Ham and eggs over a gipsy fire!” She slipped a comrade-arm through his, and they started to scramble down from their eminence, leaving at each step a fragment of the mighty spectacle behind them. Vance, reluctantly following, thought to himself: “She never stays anywhere more than five minutes—”
But by the time they had reached the motor hunger had seized him too, and he was laughing with her while she made sure that the lunch basket and thermos were somewhere among the odds and ends under the seat, and thinking he had never met anybody who made things so easy, yet was somehow so gaily aloof. With a fresh expenditure of persuasion and violence she got the motor going, and they backed out of the trail, and started down the mountain. About halfway of the descent Miss Spear turned into another trail, deeply shadowed, and they took out their provisions, and began to climb through the forest. Presently the little woodland noises, twitter of birds and stir of leaf, were all merged in the tinkle of an unseen brook, and a little farther on they met the brook itself, leaping down wet ledges in a drip of ferns and grasses, till it led them to the rocky pool encircled with turf of which Miss Spear had told him. There she unpacked the basket, and Vance brought two stones, and some twigs to lay across them; but they could find no dry fuel in that mossy dripping place, and had to eat their eggs raw, and munch the ham between slices of stale bread. Luckily the coffee was piping hot, and when Vance had drained his cup his tongue was loosened, and there poured from him all that he had been revolving in his mind, and thirsting to utter, since his first encounter with Miss Spear at the Willows. He could hardly keep the thread of the talk in his hands, so quickly did one idea tumble out after another, and so many new trains of thought did Miss Spear’s answers start in the coverts of his mind.
Afterward, in looking back at the adventure, he wondered at the fact that he had hardly been conscious of his companion’s age or sex, hardly aware of the grave beauty of her face, had felt her only as the mysterious vehicle of all the new sensations pouring into his soul—as if she had been the element harmonizing the scene, or a being born of the sunrise and the forest.
Yet afterward he saw nothing ethereal or remote about her; to his memory she became again a dark-haired girl with thoughtful eyes and animated lips, who leaned back, her hat tossed off, her bare arms folded behind her head, and plied him with friendly questions. The trouble was that every one of the questions, though to her so evidently simple and matter-of-course for him, called a new vision out of the unknown, as the car’s headlights, while they climbed the mountain, had kept on painting pictures on the darkness. The simplest things she said presupposed a familiarity with something or other that he was ignorant of: allusions to people and books, associations of ideas, images and metaphors, each giving an electric shock to his imagination, and making him want to linger and question before she hurried him on to the next point.
What she wanted, for her part, was evidently just to be helpful and friendly. She had guessed, perhaps, that there was not much nourishment for him in life at the Tracys’, and wondered what direction he would take when that interval was over, as she assumed it would be soon. He acknowledged that he had accepted his parents’ proposal to send him to his cousins for his convalescence because it was a way of being brought nearer New York, which at the moment was the place he most wanted to get to; and when she asked why—whether just as a big sight, or with some special object? he answered, feeling himself hot from feet to forehead at the confession, yet unable to hold it back, that, yes, what he wanted was to live in New York and be a writer.
“A writer? I see. But that’s interesting.” Miss Spear raised herself
