My Dear Cornelia/Book 2/Chapter 7
As I entered the wood path through the birches that run down to my own cottage, I thought I saw a boyish youngish figure slipping among the trees to the eastward. A moment later, I met Dorothy walking demurely up the path, with a book in her hand, closed upon one finger.
"Watching the sun set?" I asked, diplomatically.
"No," she said, "watching him disappear."
"Watching whom disappear?" I inquired, being invited.
"Oh, a boy that I like. We've been reading one of mother's new books. It's about a girl, Deirdre, who didn't want to marry a king, because there was a boy that she liked very much better—in all ways. And so they ran away and lived in the woods—and died happily."
"Oho!" I exclaimed. "I suspect the happiness of their death has been greatly exaggerated. It seemed to me rather dreadful. It's James Stephens's version, isn't it?"
"Yes," said Dorothy, and turning the golden dusk of her eyes with a sweet young gravity full upon mine, she added: "How old was my mother when you first knew her?"
"About your age, Dorothy. Why do you ask?"
"Was she very different then—from the way she is now?"
"She was quite a bit like you, then," I said, "if I remember. But why do you ask?"
"Because," she said, "she has marked the loveliest passage in this book. And I can't understand why, because she isn't like that now—not at all like that now."
"Isn't like what?"
"I mean," said Dorothy with perfect lucidity, "that this passage expresses just the way this boy and I feel. Shall I read it to you?"
"That wouldn't be quite nice," I suggested, "would it, Dorothy? Good-bye!"
"Perhaps not," she agreed; but as she moved toward the house, she turned and called after me: "But if you want to read it, you can find it on page one-hundred-and-forty."
In my own copy of James Stephens's Deirdre, I have marked, on page one-hundred-and-forty, this passage:—
"Lacking him, what could be returned to her? Her hands went cold and her mouth dry as she faced such a prospect.
"The youth who was hers. Who had no terrors for her! Who was her equal in years and frolic! She could laugh with him and at him. She could chide him and love him. She could give to him and withhold. She could be his mother as well as his wife. She could annoy him and forgive him. For between them there was such an equality of time and rights that neither could dream of mastery or feel a grief against the other. He was her beloved, her comrade, the very red of her heart, and her choice choice."