Chapter 2

In the fall of the year the meadows of Aspen glimmer in the sunlight like crumpled sheets of beaten gold; for Aspen is the land of golden-rod, of yellow earth and gilded fern.

There the crisp oaks rustle, every leaf a blot of yellow; there the burnished pines sound, sound, tremble, and resound, like gilt-stringed harps aquiver in the wind.

Sweet fern, sun-dried, bronzed, fills all the hills with incense, vague and delicate as the white down drifting from the frothy milkweed.

And where the meadow brook prattled, limpid, filtered with sunlight, Sweetheart stood knee-deep in fragrant mint, watching the aimless minnows swimming in circles. On a distant hill, dark against the blue, Donald moved with his dogs, and I saw the sun-glint on his gun, and I heard the distant “Hi--on! Hi--on!” long after he disappeared below the brown hill’s brow.

Walter, too, had gone, leaving us there by the brook together, Sweetheart and I; and I saw the crows flapping and circling far over the woods, and I heard the soft report of his dust-shot shells among the trees.

“The ruling passion, Sweetheart,” I said. “Donny chases the phantom of pleasure with his dogs. The phantom flies from Walter, and he follows with his dust-shot.”

“Then,” said Sweetheart, “follow your phantom also; there are butterflies everywhere.” She raised both arms and turned from the brook. “Everywhere flying I see butterflies--phantoms of pleasure; and, Jack, you do not follow with your net.”

“No,” said I, “the world to-day is too fair to--slay in. I even doubt that the happiness of empires hinges on the discovery of a new species of anything. Do I bore you?”

“A little,” said Sweetheart, touching the powdered gold of the blossoms about her. She laid the tip of her third finger on her lips and then on the golden-rod. “I shall not pick it; the world is too fair to-day,” she said. “What are you going to do, Jack?”

“I could doze,” I said. “Could you?”

“Yes--if you told me stories.”

I contemplated her in silence for a moment. After a while she sat down under an oak and clasped her hands.

“I am growing so old,” she sighed, “I no longer take pleasure in childish things--Donald’s dogs, Walter’s humming birds, your butterflies. Jack?”

“What?”

“Sit down on the grass.”

“What for?”

“Because I ask you.”

I sat down.

Presently she said: “I am as tall as mamma. Why should I study algebra?”

“Because,” I answered evasively.

“Your answer is as rude as though I were twenty, instead of sixteen,” said Sweetheart. “If you treat me as a child from this moment, I shall hate you.”

“Me--Sweetheart?”

“And that name!--it is good for children and kittens.”

I looked at her seriously. “It is good for women, too--when it is time,” I said. “I prophesy that one day you will hear it again. As for me, I shall not call you by that name if you dislike it.”

“I am a woman--now,” she said.

“Oh! at sixteen.”

“To-morrow I am to be seventeen.”

Presently, looking off at the blue hills, I said: “For a long time I have recognised that that subtle, indefinable attitude--we call it deference--due from men to women is due from us to you. Donny and Walter are slower to accept this. You know what you have been to us as a child; we can’t bear to lose you--to meet you in another way--to reckon with you as we reckon with a woman. But it is true: our little Sweetheart has vanished, and--you are here!”