She had done a thing and how natural and yet how strange the doing of it had been. There she was at work in a berry field—it was morning, the sun shone, boys, young girls, and mature women laughed and talked in the rows behind her. Her fingers were very busy but she listened while a woman’s voice talked of canning fruit. “Cherries take so much sugar,” the voice said. A young girl’s voice talked endlessly of some boy and girl affair. There was a tale of a ride into the country on a hay wagon, and an involved recital of “he saids” and “I saids.” And then the man had come along the rows and had got down on his knees to work beside herself—May Edgley. He was a man out of the town’s life, and had come thus, suddenly, unexpectedly. No one had ever come to her in that way. Oh, people had been kind. They had smiled and nodded, and had gone their own ways. May had not seen the sly winks Jerome Hadley had bestowed on the other berry pickers and had taken his impulse to come to her as a simple and lovely fact in life. Perhaps he was lonely like herself. For a time the two had worked together in silence and then a bantering conversation began. May had found herself able to carry her end of a conversation, to give and take with the man. She laughed at him because, although his fingers were skilled, he could not fill the berry boxes as fast as herself. And then, quite suddenly, the tone of the conversation had changed. The man became bold and his boldness had excited May. What words he had said. “I’d like to hold you in my arms. I’d like to have you alone where I could kiss you. I’d like to be alone with you in the woods or somewhere.” The others working, now far away along the rows, young girls and women, too, must also have heard just such words from the lips of men. It was the fact that they had heard such words and responded to them in kind that differentiated them from herself. It was by responding to such words that a woman got herself a lover, got married, connected herself with the stream of life. She heard such words and something within herself stirred, as it was stirring now in herself. Like a flower she opened to receive life. Strange beautiful things happened and her experience became the experience of all life, of trees, of flowers, of grasses and most of all of other women. Something arose within her and then broke. The wall of life was broken down. She became a living thing, receiving life, giving it forth, one with all life. In the berry field that morning May had gone on working after the words were said. Her fingers automatically picked berries and put them in the boxes slowly, hesitatingly. She turned to the man and laughed. How wonderful that she could control herself so.