Zona Gale

“ Past the rose tree Etheldreda saw tea brought out to the big porch. And tea usually meant Moberly. He was in fact at that moment coming up the slope of the lawn from the lodge, which seemed to kneel at the feet of the larger house much as he knelt at the feet of Etheldreda. She saw him coming, and her face lit softly, not with a blush, but with a kind of quickening flame. And as for Moberly, it smote him with a certain giddiness that, in a perfectly possible world, it was doubtless possible that she might have been looking for his coming. ”

“ Meadows had adjured her to leave open for Arnold. She stepped out in the full whiteness of the moon, beating down on the glittering grass, and crossed to the fountain.
Arnold, lying in the shadow of the lilacs, watched her as if she were an apparition from the world of his dream of her. She sat on the edge of the fountain's low basin, and the moon caught the white of the beads in her hair and the silver in her gown and the whiteness of her teeth as she smiled at her whim. The strangeness of her appearance there in that attire did not even occur to him. She was Juliet ”

“ One morning Llorien rose with a happy heart and her mind filled with a dream. Not that her mind was ever seriously filled with anything but dreams, but she usually wove them while she woke, and this was a dream of sleep. When she had made breakfast for her father, she took a little skin of milk, and a basket of reeds, filled with goat's cheese and bread and berries, and she set off across the grass for the lowland, singing as she went, so that any little night people, left by chance in the meadow, might hear her in time, and escape. ”

“ For some way, outside the errantry of prettiness and proportion, Calliope and Hannah too had come into their own.
I looked at Calliope, her face faintly flushed by the unwonted hour; at Hannah, rosy little bride; and at her adoring giant over whom some god had cast the usual spell of wedding blushes.
Verily, I thought, would not one say there is rose pink enough in the world for us all?
As the curtain rose again Calliope leaned toward me. "I don't believe any dress," she said, "pink silk or any other kind, ever dressed up so many folks's souls!" ”

“ THE PRINCESS ROMANCIA
That night I could not go to sleep with the knowledge. If only I, as I am now, might have sat on the edge of the bed and told a story to me as I was then! I am always wishing that we two might have known each other—I as I am now and I as I was then. We should have been so much more interested in each other than anybody else could ever be. I can picture us looking curiously at each other through the dark, and each would have wished to be the other—how hard we would have wished that. ”

“ The sky was marked with rose, the still reservoir gave back colour upon its breast, and the tower upon its margin might have been some guttural-christened castle on the Rhine. St. George drew a deep breath of good, new air and smiled for the sake of the things that the day was to bring him. He was in the golden age when the youthful expectation of enjoyment is just beginning to be savoured by the inevitable longing for more light, and he seemed to himself to be alluringly near the verge of both.
His first care the evening before had been to hunt out Chillingworth. ”

“ That is, that it is not the people who stay at home and indulge in pastimes and know books who get the magic of life—but rather the people who see the adventure in everything. Consequently he spent his life in the four walls of his garden, and there had the most marvelous and delightful experiences—with shadows and little leaves and kinds of wind and flowers-in-the-dark, and buds that ring like bells in the moonlight, and a harp played in the dark of a garden, and fruit gathered with the dew on it and eaten with certain spices. ”

“ He was a fine, handsome fellow,—Eric Chartres, this young lover of Lisa’s, and their sweet confusions and dignities were enchanting. Pelleas and I sat on the red sofa and beamed at them, and the little fire tossed and leaped on the hearth, and the shadows gathered in the corners and fell upon us; and on Lisa and her lover the firelight rested.
What a wonderful hour it was for our plain drawing-room, for so many years doomed to be merely the home of talk about war and rumours of war and relatives and their colourless doings and even about matches made for shadowy lovers whom it never might see. ”

“ In the tenuity of the old anthropomorphisms I marvel that they did not find the sunset a living thing, tender of mortals, forever loth to step from out one moment into the cherishing arms of the next. Think! The sunset that the Greeks knew has been flaming round the world, dying from moment to moment and from mile to mile, with no more of pause than the human heart, since sunset flamed for Hero and Helen and Ariadne.
If the sunset was made for lovers, and in our midland summers lingers on their account, then last night it was lingering partly for Miggy and Peter. ”

“ And seeing it so, and being filled with her wish for something which should take her thought away from herself and from her difference from all the world, the Princess Romancia was instantly minded to make a garden.
Night being the work time and play time of the fairies, the princess went at once to the palace granaries and selected seeds of many kinds, flower and vegetable and fern seeds, and she brought them to this corner of rich earth, and there she planted them, under the moon. She would call no servants to help her, fearing lest they would smile among themselves at her strange doing. ”