resolved should
be wholly and exclusively mine.

There, all unaware of me still, she stood, my essential feminine,
the embodiment of the inner thing in life for me--and moreover an
unknown other, a person like myself.

She held a little book in her hand, open as if she were walking
along and reading it. That chanced to be her pose, but indeed she was
standing quite still, looking away towards the gray and lichenous
shrubbery wall and, as I think now, listening. Her lips were a
little apart, curved to that faint, sweet shadow of a smile.

Section 3

I recall with a vivid precision her queer start when she heard the
rustle of my approaching feet, her surprise, her eyes almost of
dismay for me. I could recollect, I believe, every significant word
she spoke during our meeting, and most of what I said to her. At
least, it seems I could, though indeed I may deceive myself. But
I will not make the attempt. We were both too ill-educated to
speak our full meanings, we stamped out our feelings with clumsy
stereotyped phrases; you who are better taught would fail to catch
our intention. The effect would be inanity. But our first words
I may give you, because though they conveyed nothing to me at the
time, afterwards they meant much.

"YOU, Willie!" she said.

"I have come," I said--forgetting in the instant all the elaborate
things I had intended to say. "I thought I would surprise you--"

"Surprise me?"

"Yes."

She stared at me for a moment. I can see her pretty face now as
it looked at me--her impenetrable dear face. She laughed a queer
little laugh and her color went for a moment, and then so soon as
she had spoken, came back again.

"Surprise me at what?" she said with a rising note.

I was too intent to explain myself to think of what might lie in
that.

"I wanted to tell you," I said, "that I didn't mean quite . . .
the things I put in my letter."

Section 4

When I and Nettie had been sixteen we had been just of an age and
contemporaries altogether. Now we were a year and three-quarters
older, and she--her metamorphosis was almost complete, and I was
still only at the beginning of a man's long adolescence.

In an instant she grasped the situation. The hidden motives of her
quick ripened little mind flashed out their intuitive scheme of
action. She treated me with that neat perfection of understanding
a young woman has for a boy.

"But how did you come?" she asked.

I told her I had walked