The feeling of
intense, happy aliveness in a wonderful world was still on her, and
she wanted to be alone to think things out--to think out especially
the thing she had discovered last night--and what to do about it.
It was as warm as June by this time, for the sun was getting higher,
and she went slowly down the paths with the sun shining on her hair
and making it look like fire, breaking, as she went, a few more
flowers to pin in her dress. She had put on one of her old
picture-frocks, a straight dull-cream wool thing that she wore in
the mornings at home, girdled in with a silver cord about the hips.
She fitted the garden exceedingly well, though nothing was further
from her thoughts.
At the far end, among a tangle of roses and beneath a group of
shade-trees, the Harringtons had set a little fountain, a flat,
low-set marble basin with a single jet of water springing high, and
falling almost straight down again. Its purpose was to cool the air
on very hot days, but it always flowed till frost, because it was so
pretty Phyllis never could bear to have it shut off. Joy loved the
half-hidden, lovely place, though she had only had one glimpse of it
before, and she sat down by it and began to try to think things out.
She had a much harder thinking to do than she'd had for a long time.
"A 'hard world for gentlemen'!" meditated Joy, and laughed as she
trailed one hand in the water. "It's a much harder one for ladies,
if Allan but knew it!"
She bent over, half-absently, to watch the water in the basin.
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