Those who knew her soon enough to play with her the duplex game of
bodily delight and mental inebriety, remember hours so near the wild
sanity of natural life that only old Arcadian names are spacious
enough to bound them. There was the summer day of riotous vagary when
she and her young chum set forth to navigate the Charles, a block of
ice in the boat for adventurous but uncatalogued uses, and the delays
and mishaps of the voyage, and all the long, insect-thridded night
spent in the boat, the two inventive young heads on the ice which
was their diminishing pillow. There was the tramp across fields from
Auburndale (the Auburndale transmuted by James Jeffrey Roche, in a
gallant paraphrase, to “loveliest village of the prepossessing”) into
an iris-blue swamp, this after earnest debate whether it is a more
delirious fun to dash in “accoutred as you are,” to the ruination
of shoes and stockings or make the assault barefooted with skirts
kilted away from the blessed unction of black mud. To the everlasting
richness of memory, it was barefooted the two hoydens made their
plunge, and sank, with every sucking step, from sun-warmed mud above
to icy cool below. Wild with the bliss of it they waded furiously, and
the day was of so ineffable a light and texture as to lull them into
forgetfulness of the iris itself for which they had adventured, and it
was left behind, piles of withering beauty, entrancing, like fabrics
and translucent gems. Only that night were they remembered, and she who
was Lou Guiney wrote in magnificent surety:
“You shall have them in Paradise.”
There was the adventure of the field, in company with her dog, he “so
big and so unsophisticated,” and the imminence of a heifer with an
inherited prejudice against dogs of all degrees.
“She’ll chase him,” said Lou Guiney, from her liberality to varying
events. “We shall have to run for it.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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