Good morning, Jane; good morning,” he responded with unusual cordiality.
“Oh! It isn’t Jane,” she laughed, “it’s Lucy. L-U-C-Y Lucy. Last week you persistently thought I was my sister Amanda. This morning I am my cousin Jane. Tomorrow I suppose it will be ‘good morning, Mrs. Brockett;’ or ‘Howdy, Granny Ball!’”
A more delicately attuned ear than Archibald’s might have detected a lurking note of vexation in the girl’s saucy speech. He flushed with annoyance at his own awkwardness. Yesterday he would have smiled with condescending inattention, and probably called her “Amelia” at their next meeting.
“Yes,” she was thinking, as they walked together down the road, “if I were a stone or a weed or some nasty old beetle or other, he would know my name well enough.” She was one of a group of girls whom he had seen grow up in almost daily association with his own nieces and nephews at home. It was not to be expected that he could associate them. He regretted that there had been made no arbitrary classification of the family of “Girls,” whereby a man of studious instincts and mental preoccupation might be able to identify the individual at sight, and even name it at a moment’s notice. However, he felt quite sure that he would not soon forget that it was Lucy who carried the lilies and bade him good morning, like a second vision of spring.
“Let me carry your flowers,” he offered; not through any tardy spirit of gallantry; solely because he knew better than she how to handle a bunch of blossoms, and it pained him to see the big wax-like petals bruised and jostled. The odor of the flowers was heavy and penetrating, like the fumes of a subtle intoxicant that reached Archibald’s brain, and wrought and wove fantastic thoughts and visions there. He looked down into the girl’s face, and her soft, curved lips made him think of peaches that he had bitten; of grapes that he had tasted; of a cup’s rim from which he had sometimes sipped wine.
