Arthur Stringer

“ A touch of maturity after adolescence, a feeling in all nature for the more sober prose after the wilder vernal poetry, seemed to fill the warming earth.
A vague sense of something impending and climactic took possession of the young professor of anthropology as he walked beside the silent and brooding Sybil down through the orchard and the second meadow to the river where the boat was moored. It was Nature asking no longer mere dream and rhapsody, but demanding achievement and surrender. And it. tended, in some way, to make the young scholar rather silent, and secretly uncomfortable. ”

“ The young professor tried to imagine Anne in anything but black. It was as hard as trying to imagine Sybil in anything but pink and white and blue. Then he felt the large white pearl buttons on his coat and adjusted his gayly tinted tie. After all, there was something rejuvenating in this marching with the young. ”

“ This sort of thing must have its limits, painful as it might be to point them out to her.
“Pooh!” said Sybil, unperturbed. “You take that tree, and I'll take this one!” .
“I'd prefer not,” said the other, backing away.
“Don't be a poke!” said Sybil. “I've done this since I was ten years old! And if you've never eaten cherries off the tree, you don't know what living is.”
The young professor still backed away, doggedly, for already she was clambering up among the lower branches of a near-by tree. He could hear her movements amid the screening foliage. ”