An innocent, unconscious love like Bebee's wants so little food to make
it all content. Such mere trifles are beautiful and sweet to it. Such
slender stray gleams of light suffice to make a broad, bright golden noon
of perfect joy around it.
All the delirium, and fever, and desire, and despair, that are in maturer
passion, are far away from it: far as is the flash of the meteor across
sultry skies from the blue forget-me-not down in the brown meadow brook.
It was very wonderful to Bebee that he, this stranger from Rubes'
fairyland, could come at all to keep pace with her little clattering
wooden shoes over the dust and the grass in the dim twilight time. The
days went by in a trance of sweet amaze, and she kept count of the hours
no more by the cuckoo-clock of the mill-house, or the deep chimes of the
Brussels belfries; but only by such moments as brought her a word from
his lips, or even a glimpse of him from afar, across the crowded square.
She sat up half the nights reading the books he gave her, studying the
long cruel polysyllables, and spelling slowly through the phrases that
seemed to her so cramped and tangled, and which yet were a pleasure to
unravel forsake of the thought they held.
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