The Anatomy of Love/Chapter 12

It was not until the clear and coldly penetrating light of the following morning broke in upon him that Macraven fully realized-how ignominiously he had failed in his efforts toward a disciplining of the airy and unchastened Sybil. It had been his intention to make no direct allusion to this failure and the reasons thereof, but he felt that Anne would not be satisfied with silence. It was, accordingly, with a more or less troubled and apprehensive mind that he confronted his fellow conspirator, that morning, on the veranda.

“You haven't given me one crumb of Amboro news, as yet,” he told her temporizingly, as he took a wicker chair at her side.

And if he seemed a little overeager to know if it was hot and dull in town, and whither this family had gone and whither that, and indeed, a hundred and one different trifling bits of news and gossip, Anne betrayed no sign that she even dimly apprehended the reason for this feverish flow of interrogation. From Amboro, he glided easily off into the avenues of science, and it was not long before he had forgotten all motive for that movement in the sober delights which the mere browsing along such well-known paths brought to him.

As they sat there talking together, he could catch occasional glimpses of Sybil and young Sewell, through the shrubbery, busily engaged in marking out a tennis court. For once, for some undiscovered reason, he could look down at them calmly and disinterestedly. He even tried to tell Anne what a will-of-the-wisp Sybil was, what an elflike spirit she had always seemed to him, fluttering about the old orchard and singing about the old gardens, a dreamy-hearted epicurean, drifting down her gay life like a butterfly floating through a world of flowers. And she always seemed to strike such a vivid note against the landscape; her very choice of color was always so artless and yet so effective.

The listening Anne, being a woman of the world, acquiesced in this, and held her peace. But after luncheon she reappeared on the veranda in a sailor suit of white lawn with a soft collar, and with three moss roses pinned at her waist and a vivid bud or two in her hair.

The professor of anthropology, looking up from his book, gazed at her with startled and almost unbelieving eyes, as she sat there with her head bent over a magazine, oblivious of his presence. It seemed, as he gazed, that he had always before looked on a chrysalis of Anne—on an Anne, in fact, in the pupa state.

“What have you been doing to yourself?” he demanded, sitting up, a little jealous of that lost and somber Anne who had now passed, he felt, forever beyond his world and his reach.

Anne laughed a little.

“Sybil's been telling me not to part my hair in the middle.”

“Did you?”

“Of course, always—until to-day.”

“Do you know,” confessed the honest Macraven, “I never once thought of the fact that you had hair, until this moment!”

“But I had, you see, all the time,” said Anne.

A song sparrow on a Japanese almond tree trilled out its sweet five-noted call, like a tiny fountain of sound. The bees droned and hummed about the quiet garden. The wind stirred and died in the treetops. A sense of peace after unrest stole over the young professor of anthropology.

He sighed, audibly. Anne looked up quickly at the sound. Then she, too, gazed out over the gardens and the treetops, and, as her companion had done, found herself surrendering to the spirit of peace that brooded over the tranquil landscape.

“Don't you sometimes think,” said Anne at last, “that-we're always working and fretting too much, down at Amboro?”

“There's always so much to do, so much to be done,” sighed the man of science.

“But I wonder if it pays—to crowd beauty and peace like this out of life?” asked Anne dreamily, her eyes on the swaying treetops.

“But life is so short—something must be surrendered, don't you think?” he argued. He, too, was looking out over the world of sun and shadow and waving trees.

“But should we crowd out the things that make life best worth living?” Anne queried softly. “After all, shouldn't the appeal of beauty be as strong as the appeal of work? It has always seemed to me that it is only when work is touched with beauty, in some way or another, that it is worth while.”

Macraven looked at her searchingly. Anne, of all persons, transformed into an apostle of the ethereal issues of life!

“Life was not made for work, but work was made for life!” he quoted.

“But it's worth remembering that the old philosopher who first said that had given the best of his life to drudgery before he found it out,” retorted Anne.

“I suppose it ought really to be a happy mixture of the two. For it's only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy.”

“I like that better than your Spencer,” assented Anne.

A soft rustle of skirts cut short any answer Macraven might have essayed. It was Sybil, pink and glowing, with a tennis racket in her hand.

“Still talking of poor old Spencer?” cried the girl, leaning on the back of Anne's wicker chair. “Or what new and world-moving metaphysical hypothesis are you two old dears propounding? You're like two ants—no, like two moles, burying yourselves in books and abstractions when there's such a lovely world just outside! And you think I'm silly and empty just because I go along like a bee, only looking for honey!”

“The bee, dear, deserves every flower it finds,” said the older woman, though even Macraven noticed that she had winced at the “two old dears.” It was the first time Sybil had ever given him a sense of intrusion. It was the first time he had been able to study her with a feeling of detachment.

He reopened his book and sought for his place once more, abstractedly.

“No more reading to-day, sir!” cried the girl, placing her two small sun-browned hands over the open pages with a mock show of sternness. “We've all got to go and gather fresh strawberries, for we're going to have one of the far-famed Shotwell strawberry shortcakes!”

“Let's!” said Anne jubilantly.

And on the way to the patch, the young professor of anthropology came face to face with a new and strangely disconcerting truth. He found that it was almost as delightful to lift Anne, for all her solemn eyes, down from a rail fence, as it was to help the ebullient Sybil.