Jane was waiting for him now, in the afternoon sunshine, under the willow tree. She was going on a supper picnic with his father and mother up the lake shore beyond the City Limits. Jane was oiling her Columbia Safety in preparation for the fête. Suddenly she saw him, pedaling down Pine Street, a big picnic box strapped to his handlebars.
“Yoo-hoo,” she called.
He waved his cap and turned to bump up over the curb stone, then dismounted at the gate.
“Ready?” he asked.
Jane picked up her coat and wheeled her bicycle down the path.
“Just,” she said.
André held her coat for her.
“Isn’t this new?” he inquired.
She nodded, smiling under her tiny hat brim.
“It’s awfully good-looking.”
Jane mounted her wheel.
“Where are your father and mother?”
André pointed.
“Here they come,” he said. “Aren’t they sweet?”
Jane’s glance followed his finger. Half a block away Mr. and Mrs. Duroy were approaching down Pine Street. They were mounted on a tandem bicycle. Mrs. Duroy’s tall figure rose above the handlebars with a certain angular ease. Her long brown skirts flapped gaily against her mudguard and her sailor hat was rakishly askew. Mr. Duroy, behind her, was riding the bumps of the cedar-block pavement with Gallic grace. He wore a grey tweed suit with knickerbockers and he looked very plump and elderly and debonair. When he saw Jane he waved his tweed cap and tried to kiss his hand and his eyeglasses fell off promptly. The wheel wobbled perilously as he recaptured them.
“Don’t be so gallant!” said Mrs. Duroy. “Hello, Jane.”
Jane and André bumped down over the curb and swung into line with them. Jane’s mother was waving from the parlor window. She was laughing, a little, at Mr. and Mrs. Duroy, but she looked very good-natured. As if she weren’t thinking anything worse about Mr. Duroy than that he was French.
Jane and André sailed easily ahead of the tandem.
“They are sweet,” said Jane. “They have so much fun together.”
“They always do,” said André. And added simply, “They’re so much in love.”
That was a strange comment, thought Jane, to make on a pair of parents. She would never have thought of saying it about her father and mother. Nor about Flora’s mother and Mr. Furness. To be sure Mrs. Lester often spoke very tenderly to Edith and Rosalie and Muriel of their father. But that was different. He was dead. Now that she came to think of it, it was obviously quite true of Mr. and Mrs. Duroy. He never looked at her, queer as she sometimes looked, without a little beam of admiration in his wise brown eyes. Even when they argued, as they often did, and he disagreed with her utterly, he greeted the sallies that routed him with a whimsical air of flattering applause. Very different from her father’s “Oh, all right, Lizzie!” that terminated so many domestic discussions. Funny, when she thought of it, she could hardly remember Flora’s mother ever speaking to Mr. Furness at all, really speaking to him, even to argue. Marriage was a strange thing. It began, she supposed, as André said, by being so much in love and it ended?
André’s thoughts must have followed hers.
“They’re lucky, I suppose,” he said. “All marriages aren’t like that.”
Jane didn’t reply.
“But they could be,” said André, “if people cared enough.”
Jane went on pedaling in silence.
“I don’t see how it comes,” said André, “that change—in the way you feel—toward the girl you want to—marry.”
Jane still felt that really she had nothing to say. André had never talked just like this before. Of how people felt. Real people—not people in books. It was part of growing up, she supposed.
The lake was very bright and blue as they bowled along up the Drive. The Park was lovely in fresh June leaf. North of the Park the city stopped abruptly. The yards grew larger and the big brick and frame houses further apart and the pavement very much more bumpy. For some time they had to follow the car-tracks, jolting off the cobblestones at intervals, to let the horsecars jingle by. Soon they turned off toward the east again.
The road here was so sandy that they had to push the bicycles and there were no more houses. Just clumps of willow trees and groves of scrub-oak and stone pine, with wild flowers underfoot. They heard the lake before they saw it. The sound of little waves, breaking and pausing and breaking again, on the long hard beaches. They found an oak wood, crowning a tiny sand dune. The ground was blue with wild geranium and a few late violets, purple and yellow dogtooth, stunted by the cool lake breeze, still lingered in the damper places. Beyond the trees was the great stretch of yellow sand and the stainless wash of blue that was the lake.
Mr. Duroy stretched himself beneath an oak and took out a long black cigar. Mrs. Duroy began unpacking the picnic basket at once. She had brought a little brass kettle, with an alcohol lamp, in which to boil water for tea.
“Don’t be so restless, m’amie,” said Mr. Duroy lazily. “The sun is still high.”
“It’s six o’clock,” said Mrs. Duroy capably, as she laid the tablecloth. Jane was getting out the sandwiches. André was walking over the sand to fill the kettle in the little breakers.
“She must be practical,” said Mr. Duroy to Jane. “It’s her British blood. Thank God I’m a Celt. What is time on a night like this?” His brown eyes twinkled as he watched Jane arranging the sandwiches in neat little piles on the paper plates. “But you, too, little Jane, are practical.”
“Oh, no!” said Jane earnestly. “Really, I’m not.”
“Why, then,” continued Mr. Duroy lazily, “do you arrange the sandwiches?”
Jane could easily answer that.
“Oh,” she said again, “I just do what’s expected of me.”
“That’s a bad habit,” said Mr. Duroy seriously. “Especially for youth. You must stop that in time, or you’ll never get anywhere.”
Jane looked at him, a little perplexed. André came back with the kettle.
“What must
