Page:Conflict (1927).pdf/209

 A silence in which Sheilah gave herself utterly to the sky, and sun, and the sound of the wind in the two pine trees. Sheilah loved the sound of the wind in the pine trees. So did the man at the foot of them she had discovered.

'Like waves washing on a shore a long way off,' he had remarked lightly the first time he had listened to them with Sheilah.

'Or flames in an open grate,' shyly Sheilah had replied.

'Or the swish of skirts,' the man had suggested the next day.

Sheilah, grown more courageous by then, had added, gazing up at the scudding white billows above, 'The swish of the cloud's skirts.'

The man, his eyes following her skyward gaze, had finished, 'The cloud's skirts, brushing against the blue tiles of the sky.'

'Are you a poet?' Sheilah asked.

'Are you a poetess?' the man replied, and then confessed he had cribbed the 'blue tiles of the sky' from Amy Lowell.

Building similes of this sort, collaborating in fantastic metaphors, had become an almost daily pastime between these two. Harmless and diverting.