Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/81

 swiftly forward and at the same time calling my attention to the twittering brown flutter of a tree full of cedar-wings.

"Yes," I insisted, "I'm sure it's as interesting as bird study. This lady doubts your existence. Listen to this." I pulled forth a delicately tinted letter with a faint scent which died among the pungent fresh odors of the rain-washed air. Tell me,' she writes, 'whether Cornelia is real. If she is, I hope you are not in love with her. She is the feminine of Sir Austin Feverel. She has no heart. She is just unfaltering correctness. As a girl, I fancy, she folded her still hands in her lap and calmly waited till her family had consulted the bankers and the genealogists before she decided to care for the man she married. As a woman, she wishes to inspect and authorize every passion before she allows it to peep. I pity her children. She has never done a thing in her life merely because for one rapturous hour it seemed the most desirable thing in the wide world to do. I should hate her.

Cornelia brushed me sidelong with the sweep of her gray eyes, of which the effect, when one catches it so, is like that of the cool rays of a May sun bent to a focus under a burning-glass. But she