Page:The White Peacock, Lawrence, 1911.djvu/114

106 The laughter faded at once, and her great seriousness looked out again at me, pleading.

“You are like Burne-Jones’ damsels. Troublesome shadows are always crowding across your eyes, and you cherish them. You think the flesh of the apple is nothing, nothing. You only care for the eternal pips. Why don’t you snatch your apple and eat it, and throw the core away?”

She looked at me sadly, not understanding, but believing that I in my wisdom spoke truth, as she always believed when I lost her in a maze of words. She stooped down, and the chaplet fell from her hair, and only one bunch of berries remained. The ground around us was strewn with the four-lipped burrs of beechnuts, and the quaint little nut-pyramids were scattered among the ruddy fallen leaves. Emily gathered a few nuts.

“I love beechnuts,” she said, “but they make me long for my childhood again till I could almost cry out. To go out for beechnuts before breakfast; to thread them for necklaces before supper;—to be the envy of the others at school next day! There was as much pleasure in a beech necklace then, as there is in the whole autumn now—and no sadness. There are no more unmixed joys after you have grown up.” She kept her face to the ground as she spoke, and she continued to gather the fruits.

“Do you find any with nuts in?” I asked.

“Not many—here—here are two, three. You have them. No—I don’t care about them.”

I stripped one of its horny brown coat and gave it to her. She opened her mouth slightly to take it, looking up into my eyes. Some people, instead of