hoboes, darling—that’s the kind of life we’ll have to lead.”
“God!” he said bluntly. “It sounds wonderful! What a thing to happen to anyone!—and to happen to you at your age!… But won’t if make all this—this place here—seem awfully far away, and very strange—when you think back on it?”
“Yes,” the girl said quietly, and added so softly that she seemed to breathe the words—so softly that he could scarcely hear her, “—and quite impossibly lovely!”
He stared at her in blank astonishment for a minute: she had clasped her hands against her breast in a natural and simple gesture, the moon had made an aureole of magic around the silken strands of her brown hair, and suddenly he noticed that her eyes were bright with tears.
“Very, very far away,” she said in a low tone, “and enormously beautiful…. You see,” she said simply, “this is my home…. I was born here, and I love it.” She was silent for a moment longer, and then she said quietly but in a more matter-of-fact way:
“Don’t you think our place—this country here—is beautiful?”
He did not answer her for a moment: at first he was not even conscious that he had heard her. He kept staring at her with a comical expression of gape-jawed and hypnotic fascination. He was conscious of a queer, bewildered and inappropriate feeling of surprise—a kind of numb, absurd wonder that if he had read all the books and poems in the world, and then tried to imagine for himself something as impossibly lovely as this girl and the whole scene around her, he could never, by any soaring stretch of the imagination, have come within a million miles of it.
Behind her head the moon was making its spun aura of enchanted light, the dress she was wearing was of some sweet gossamer stuff of light moon-blue that seemed spun out of the very substance of the moon itself—to float, to move like some aerial fume of magic smoke, but the girl herself was lovely, sweet and strong as the whole earth around her. She was herself no creature of elves’fantasy, she was not lithe and slender, fleeting as a nymph: she was a warm, strong-bodied girl, wide in the hips for children, a nature warm and soft and gentle as a cow, but radiant and lovely with fair girlhood, too, and full of sweetness, strength, and tender, jolly humour.
She stood there in the middle of the white, empty road with the enchanted radiance of the moon upon her, and he stared at her unbelievingly, like
