Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/69

it sometimes made me long to kick him, that was perhaps an excess of my feeling of championship for the lovely duckling of this complacently plain family . . . or perhaps it was that her gentle graciousness towards him seemed to me part of that irritating apology of hers. . . .

To-day, for example, she was sitting apart from the rest, learning, with his assistance, a banjo-atrocity of the newest, and assuming for histrionic completeness a parody of the vilest parody on speech:

She was chanting in that silvery thread of hers, while he held the music-sheet before her. And that was Lucille Silverdale! the "L. S." of A Trial of Flight, that exquisite little sheaf of poems which, like fairy-arrows, had stirred the wings of many a shy emotion in our critical hearts—we of The Appreciator, most modern of modernities, most connaissant of connoisseurs! It was—well, it was ridiculous, of course, but wasn't it painful, too, to see a genius so belittle the gift of the most high gods?—wasn't it almost wicked, blasphemous?

They were encamped in a mist of greenness, their boat fastened to the long bough of a willow that pushed into the water; it made an ideal nook for happy lovers, and I wondered hotly if it realised its present indignity, as, eagerly invited by the rest, I drew in my canoe to their hiding-place. I hardly looked at Lucille and her Companion of the Banjo, nor did she say anything by way of welcome; she was, I gathered, too deeply absorbed in her musical studies. I hardly looked at her—but I saw her, more clearly than I saw any of the others: a slender, hazel-eyed incarnation of fragrant coolness, lying there, in white and yellow, among her gleaming blue-green cushions, while the sunbeams glinted offevery