of course, no lemonade nor sandwiches. Still, it was better than nothing. She never noticed what we were eating. I’d like to have seen that happen with the Pie along!
He kept asking her different things about the best place to stop, and what would be the prettiest thing to draw, and a whole lot of things that didn’t make any difference anyway, because nobody did very well. I suppose it was because we weren’t used to drawing out doors. Mr. Angell-drew one himself, and of course that was very good. There was a church-steeple ’way off in the back and a cow in the front, although there really was no cow. There was a steeple, but not in the place he put it.
We were late in getting back and I rather hoped Miss Peck would catch it, and that might stop her being in love; but no—Miss Naldreth herself met us in the hall, and said this open-air work was a fine idea and that she should send them often and she was grateful to Miss Peck and Mr. Angell for giving us rosy cheeks and a fine appetite! Which we didn’t have, as it was cold-meat day, and we’d had so much stuff in the field, anyway. But they blushed and Ben saw Mr. Angell give Miss Peck the picture he’d drawn, just before she went upstairs.
Well, it went on from bad to worse, and finally he invited her to a concert in the village, and then everybody talked about it. She curled her hair every day, and once when one of the other teachers was walking the older girls out they met them taking a walk, and the girls all giggled and they both blushed like anything. She had on her striped silk and a new lace collar—a grand one, Pinky said.
And Connie was the maddest thing you ever saw. She seemed to take a kind of spite at them, and you’d think to hear her talk that they did it just to hurt her feelings. She kept a watch on everything Miss Peck did, and then told us about it, and scolded away like anything. She got a headache the day we went out sketching, from sitting in the sun, and she said that if she had brain fever and died it would lie at Miss Peck’s door.
Ben wanted to hear him propose, because she never had heard anybody, and I’m sure I wish she had had my chance, for it was the stupidest thing in the world. If anybody proposed to me that way, I shouldn’t count it, because he didn’t do one thing properly. That is, I shouldn’t count it very much—nor Connie either. Of course if he had done it in any proper place—a conservatory, or at a ball, or in the woods, like so many people, we should never have known about it, most probably. But he didn’t. I shouldn’t suppose he ever read a novel in his life, from he way he acted.
I was in a private place in the cellar of the gym, reading a book Pinky West lent me. She did it to pay me for letting her use my room for something and keeping still about it. This place is behind the storm doors that are piled up there and some ladders and stands for flower-pots. I have cleaned it out and it is like a very little room with walls about up to your shoulders. I found an old rug and put it down, and I usually have some apples and a book there, and it is very snug and pleasant, being near the furnace in the winter, and damp and cool in the summer. In the book that I was reading—“Captive Queenie” is the name of it—I was just at the proposal part, and I copied a little of it afterward, just to show you the difference between a real love-making and what Mr. Angell did.
“Only the throbbing of the distant violins and the musical drip of a fountain over the costly ferns disturbed the stillness of the perfumed atmosphere. Evesham glanced down at the great tear-filled violet eyes, the tangled mesh of sunny hair and the quivering rose--leaf chin pressed to his breast, and strong man as he was, trembled with passion and despair.
“‘Ah, Queenie,’ he cried hoarsely, ‘beautiful little Queenie, how have you bewitched me? Sweetheart, my own little sweetheart, will you leave all and come with me? Bound as I am by every tie of honor to another, I would break those bonds like straws at one touch of your dimpled finger! I have little to offer but a name that has been handed down from father to son for as many generations of noble service as years have passed over your golden head; but that and my two hands must ever be yours, as my heart has been since that day I first saw you in the orchard—a blossom among the fruit!?”
Well, of course that made it worse, when Mr. Angell began:
The first thing I heard was Miss Peck’s voice saying,
“This is very welcome after the glare,” and then Mr. Angell said:
“Yes, and I don’t think we shall be disturbed here. Won’t you sit down?”
