Edith Wharton - Penn State University

Summerto find out first and let you know? It will be time enoughto resign if I’m mistaken.”Her pride flamed into her cheeks at the suggestion ofhis intervening. “I don’t want anybody should coax her tokeep me if I don’t suit.”He coloured too. “I give you my word I won’t do that.Only wait till tomorrow, will you?” He looked straightinto her eyes with his shy grey glance. “You can trust me,you know—you really can.”All the old frozen woes seemed to melt in her, and she murmuredawkwardly, looking away from him: “Oh, I’ll wait.”VTHERE HAD NEVER BEEN such a June in Eagle County. Usuallyit was a month of moods, with abrupt alternations ofbelated frost and mid-summer heat; this year, day followedday in a sequence of temperate beauty. Every morning abreeze blew steadily from the hills. Toward noon it builtup great canopies of white cloud that threw a cool shadowover fields and woods; then before sunset the clouds dissolvedagain, and the western light rained its unobstructedbrightness on the valley.On such an afternoon Charity Royall lay on a ridge abovea sunlit hollow, her face pressed to the earth and the warmcurrents of the grass running through her. Directly in herline of vision a blackberry branch laid its frail white flowersand blue-green leaves against the sky. Just beyond, atuft of sweet-fern uncurled between the beaded shoots ofthe grass, and a small yellow butterfly vibrated over themlike a fleck of sunshine. This was all she saw; but she felt,above her and about her, the strong growth of the beechesclothing the ridge, the rounding of pale green cones oncountless spruce-branches, the push of myriads of sweetfernfronds in the cracks of the stony slope below the wood,and the crowding shoots of meadowsweet and yellow flagsin the pasture beyond. All this bubbling of sap and slippingof sheaths and bursting of calyxes was carried to heron mingled currents of fragrance. Every leaf and bud andblade seemed to contribute its exhalation to the pervadingsweetness in which the pungency of pine-sap prevailedover the spice of thyme and the subtle perfume of fern,26