Love stories; Reformatories -- Fiction; Social classes -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
It was too light now for foraging, and Jean took up her eastward march,
avoiding the highways and resorting to hedgerows, stone walls, or
briers where the woods failed. As the day grew she saw farmhands pass
to their work, and once, in the far distance, she caught the seductive
glitter of a dinner pail. She was ravenous from her long fast, and
nibbled at one or two palatable wild roots which she knew of old. They
seemed savorless to-day, almost sickening in fact; and her fancy dwelt
covetously upon the resources of orchard, garden, and field, that the
next month but one would lavish. Nevertheless, she harbored no regret
that she had taken time somewhat too eagerly by the forelock.
Noon found her beside a lake well up among the hills. She knew the
region by hearsay. People came here in hot weather, she remembered.
Somewhere alongshore should stand log-camps of a species which urban
souls fondly thought pioneer, but which snugly neighbored a summer
hotel where ice, newspapers, scandal, and like benefits of civilization
could be had. These play houses were as yet tenantless, of course--and
foodless; but the chance of finding some cast-off garment, possibly
too antiquated for a departing summer girl, but precious beyond cloth
of gold to a fugitive in blue-and-white check, buoyed Jean's spirits
and lent fresh energy to her muscles. Equipped with another dress,
be its style and color what they might, she felt that she could cope
fearlessly with fate.
She had followed the vagrant shore-line for perhaps a mile when two
things, assailing her senses simultaneously, brought her to an abrupt
halt. One was the smell of frying bacon; the other was a baritone voice
which broke suddenly into the chorus of a rollicking popular air. Jean
wheeled for flight, but, beguiled by the bacon which just then wafted a
fresh appeal, she turned, cautiously parted the undergrowth, and beheld
a young man swaying in a hammock slung between two birch trees. He held
in his lap a book into which he dipped infrequently, singing meanwhile;
and his attention was further divided between the crackling spider
and a fishing-rod propped in a forked stick at the water's edge. Jean
viewed his methods with disapproval. It was neither the way to read,
sing, fry bacon, nor yet fish.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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