Bildungsromans; Fathers and sons -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
Among all of the people they met Sue passed with a sort of happy freedom
that confounded Sam, as he had formed a habit of thinking of her always
as one shut within herself. Many of the people they saw she knew, and
he came to believe that she had chosen the place for their love making
because she admired and held in high favour the lives of these people of
the out-of-doors and wanted her lover to be in some way like them. Out
of the solitude of the woods, along the shores of little lakes, they
called to her as she passed, demanding that she come ashore and show
her husband, and among them she sat talking of other seasons and of the
inroads of the lumber men upon their paradise. “The Burnhams were
this year on the shores of Grant Lake, the two school teachers from
Pittsburgh would come early in August, the Detroit man with the crippled
son was building a cabin on the shores of Bone River.”
Sam sat among them in silence, renewing constantly his admiration for
the wonder of Sue’s past life. She, the daughter of Colonel Tom, the
woman rich in her own right, to have made her friends among these
people; she, who had been pronounced an enigma by the young men of
Chicago, to have been secretly all of these years the companion and
fellow spirit of these campers by the lakes.
For six weeks they led a wandering, nomadic life in that half wild land,
for Sue six weeks of tender love making, and of the expression of
every thought and impulse of her fine nature, for Sam six weeks of
readjustment and freedom, during which he learned to sail a boat, to
shoot, and to get the fine taste of that life into his being.
And then one morning they came again to the little lumber town at the
mouth of the river and sat upon the pier waiting for the Chicago boat.
They were bound once more into the world, and to that life together that
was the foundation of their marriage and that was to be the end and aim
of their two lives.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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