"Oh--oh!" she protested, shaking her head; "your philosophy is that of all reactionaries--emotional arguments which never can be justified.
Why, if the labouring man delights in the harmless hurdy-gurdy and finds his pleasure mounted on a wooden horse, should you say that the island of his delight is "vile"? All fulfilment of harmless happiness is progress, my poor friend--"
"But my harmless happiness lay in seeing the wild-fowl splashing where nothing splashes now except beer and the bathing rabble. If progress is happiness--where is mine? Gone with the curlew and the wild duck!
Therefore, there is no progress. _Quod erat_, my illogical friend."
"But _your_ happiness in such things was an exception--"
"Exceptions prove anything!"
"Yes--but--no, they don"t, either! What nonsense you can talk when you try to... . As for me I"m going down to the Brier Water to look into it. If there are any trout there foolish enough to bite at those gaudy-feathered hooks I"ll call you--"
"I"m going with you," he said, rising to his feet. She smilingly ignored his offered hands and sprang erect unaided.
The Brier Water, a cold, deep, leisurely stream, deserved its name.
Rising from a small spring-pond almost at the foot of Silverside lawn, it wound away through tangles of bull-brier and wild-rose, under arches of weed and gra.s.s and cl.u.s.tered thickets of mint, north through one of the strange little forests where it became a thread edged with a duck-haunted bog, then emerging as a clear deep stream once more it curved sharply south, recurved north again, and flowed into Sh.e.l.l Pond which, in turn, had an outlet into the Sound a mile east of Wonder Head.
If anybody ever haunted it with hostile designs upon its fishy denizens, Austin at least never did. Belted kingfisher, heron, mink, and perhaps a furtive small boy with pole and sinker and barnyard worm--these were the only foes the trout might dread. As for a man and a fly-rod, they knew him not, nor was there much chance for casting a line, because the water everywhere flowed under weeds, arched thickets of brier and gra.s.s, and leafy branches criss-crossed above.
"This place is impossible," said Selwyn scornfully. "What is Austin about to let it all grow up and run wild--"
"You _said_," observed Eileen, "that you preferred an untrimmed wilderness; didn"t you?"
He laughed and reeled in his line until only six inches of the gossamer leader remained free. From this dangled a single silver-bodied fly, glittering in the wind.
"There"s a likely pool hidden under those briers," he said; "I"m going to poke the tip of my rod under--this way--Hah!" as a heavy splash sounded from depths unseen and the reel screamed as he struck.
Up and down, under banks and over shallows rushed the invisible fish; and Selwyn could do nothing for a while but let him go when he insisted, and check and recover when the fish permitted.
Eileen, a spray of green mint between her vivid lips, watched the performance with growing interest; but when at length a big, fat, struggling speckled trout was cautiously but successfully lifted out into the gra.s.s, she turned her back until the gallant fighter had departed this life under a merciful whack from a stick.
"That," she said faintly, "is the part I don"t care for... . Is he out of all pain? ... What? Didn"t feel any? Oh, are you quite sure?"
[Ill.u.s.tration: "Eileen watched the performance with growing interest."]
She walked over to him and looked down at the beautiful victim of craft.
"Oh, well," she sighed, "you are very clever, of course, and I suppose I"ll eat him; but I wish he were alive again, down there in those cool, sweet depths."
"Killing frogs and insects and his smaller brother fish?"
"Did he do _that_?"
"No doubt of it. And if I hadn"t landed him, a heron or a mink would have done it sooner or later. That"s what a trout is for: to kill and be killed."
She smiled, then sighed. The taking of life and the giving of it were mysteries to her. She had never wittingly killed anything.
"Do you say that it doesn"t hurt the trout?" she asked.
"There are no nerves in the jaw muscles of a trout--Hah!" as his rod twitched and swerved under water and his reel sang again.
And again she watched the performance, and once more turned her back.
"Let me try," she said, when the _coup-de-grace_ had been administered to a l.u.s.ty, brilliant-tinted bulltrout. And, rod in hand, she bent breathless and intent over the bushes, cautiously thrusting the tip through a thicket of mint.
She lost two fish, then hooked a third--a small one; but when she lifted it gasping into the sunlight, she shivered and called to Selwyn:
"Unhook it and throw it back! I--I simply can"t stand that!"
Splash! went the astonished trout; and she sighed her relief.
"There"s no doubt about it," she said, "you and I certainly do belong to different species of the same genus; men and women _are_ separate species. Do you deny it?"
"I should hate to lose you that way," he returned teasingly.
"Well, you can"t avoid it. I gladly admit that woman is not too closely related to man. We don"t like to kill things; it"s an ingrained distaste, not merely a matter of ethical philosophy. You like to kill; and it"s a trait common also to children and other predatory animals.
Which fact," she added airily, "convinces me of woman"s higher civilisation."
"It would convince me, too," he said, "if woman didn"t eat the things that man kills for her."
"I know; isn"t it horrid! Oh, dear, we"re neither of us very high in the scale yet--particularly you."
"Well, I"ve advanced some since the good old days when a man went wooing with a club," he suggested.
"_You_ may have. But, anyway, you don"t go wooing. As for man collectively, he has not progressed so very far," she added demurely.
"As an example, that dreadful Draymore man actually hurt my wrist."
Selwyn looked up quickly, a shade of frank annoyance on his face and a vision of the fat sybarite before his eyes. He turned again to his fishing, but his shrug was more of a shudder than appeared to be complimentary to Percy Draymore.
She had divined, somehow, that it annoyed Selwyn to know that men had importuned her. She had told him of her experience as innocently as she had told Nina, and with even less embarra.s.sment. But that had been long ago; and now, without any specific reason, she was not certain that she had acted wisely, although it always amused her to see Selwyn"s undisguised impatience whenever mention was made of such incidents.
So, to torment him, she said: "Of course it is somewhat exciting to be asked to marry people--rather agreeable than otherwise--"
"What!"
Waist deep in bay-bushes he turned toward her where she sat on the trunk of an oak which had fallen across the stream. Her arms balanced her body; her ankles were interlocked. She swung her slim russet-shod feet above the brook and looked at him with a touch of _gaminerie_ new to her and to him.
"Of course it"s amusing to be told you are the only woman in the world,"
she said, "particularly when a girl has a secret fear that men don"t consider her quite grown up."
"You once said," he began impatiently, "that the idiotic importunities of those men annoyed you."
"Why do you call them idiotic?"--with pretence of hurt surprise. "A girl is honoured--"
"Oh, bosh!"
"Captain Selwyn!"
"I beg your pardon," he said sulkily; and fumbled with his reel.