They resembled each other, these two beings, as nearly in bodily
fancies as in other ways. Each, for instance, was a great water lover,
each addicted to the bath and perfumes, he perhaps because of his long
gymnasium training, and she from the instinct of all purity which
appertains to all women worth the owning.
One afternoon they had fled from the city and were walking on the
beach, beside the lake, with no one near them. For a mile in either
direction, they could look up and down and see that no intruder was in
sight. He sent flat stones skipping and galloping over the waves with
some whirling trick of underthrow, and tried to teach her the device of
it, and they sat upon the sand and ate the luncheon he had secured
preparatory to this great excursion, a luncheon devised with great
skill by a great caterer, and packed in a paper box which would go in a
coat-pocket, and they talked of many things and delighted in being
together, and alone. And he, floundering in the sand, must needs get
much of it inside his shoe. And then this reckless person, having
removed the shoe to rid himself of the sand, must needs step in a
treacherous spot and wet his stocking dismally. And the sensible thing
to do was to remove the stocking and dry it in the sun.
There should be, so far as its relation to society is concerned, no
difference between the human hand and the human foot, but, somehow, the
average man is not, as a rule, ready to exhibit his bare feet
carelessly to the one woman, and to the average woman a similar
revelation would seem a thing indelicate; but these two were not of the
common sort. Harlson pulled off his stocking as carefully as he would
have done a glove, and spread it on the sand where it might dry, and,
laughing at his disaster, he dabbled with his foot in the sand.
She looked at him curiously. She looked at the foot, too, being a
woman, and this being the man above all others to her, and then she
laughed out joyously and frankly.
"I don't believe any one but you would have done that, Grant. And what
a foot you have!"
He replied, with much pomposity, that it was the far-famed Arabian
foot, the instep of which arched so beautifully that water could flow
beneath it without wetting the skin. Just at present, though, he
thought a little water might run over it to advantage, instead of
under, the sand being a trifle mucky. And why would no one else have
done such a thing? And he was glad she liked his foot; in fact, he was
glad she liked anything about him, and rather wondered that she did,
and the world had become to him a good place to live in.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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