heir friendship was merely one of those affectionate
intellectual intimacies of which some of us have so many and which are
so often misunderstood. Or they might not. It was entirely their
business, either way.

Barry was a chatterbox. He lay on the lawn and rooted up daisies and
made them into ridiculous chains, and talked and talked and talked.
Rodney and Neville and Nan talked too, and Kay would lunge in with the
crude and charming dogmatics of his years. But Gerda, chewing a blade of
grass, lay idle and withdrawn, her fair brows unpuckered by the afternoon
sun (because it was July, 1920), her blue eyes on Barry, who was so
different; or else she would be withdrawn but not idle, for she would be
drawing houses tumbling down, or men on stilts, fantastic and proud, or
goblins, or geese running with outstretched necks round a green. Or she
would be writing something like this:

"I
Float on the tide,
In the rain.
I am the starfish vomited up by the retching cod.
He thinks
That I am he.
But I know.
That he is I.
For the creature is far greater than its god."

(Gerda was of those who think it is rather chic to have one rhyme in your
poem, just to show that you can do it.)

"That child over there makes one feel so cheap and ridiculous, jabbering
away."

That was Barry, breaking off to look at Gerda where she lay on her elbows
on a rug, idle and still. "And it's not," he went on, "that she doesn't
know about the subject, either. I've heard her on it."

He threw the daisy chain he had just made at her, so that it alighted on
her head, hanging askew over one eye.

"Just like a daisy bud herself, isn't she," he commented, and raced on,
forgetting her.

Neat in her person and ways, Gerda adjusted the daisy chain so that it
ringed her golden head in an orderly circle. Like a daisy bud herself,
Rodney agreed in his mind, his eyes smiling at her, his affection,
momentarily turned that way, groping for the wild, remote little soul in
her that he only vaguely and paternally knew. The little pretty. And
clever, too, in her own queer, uneven way. But what _was_ she, with it
all? He knew Kay, the long, sweet-tempered boy, better. For Kay
represented highly civilized, passably educated, keen-minded youth. Gerda
wasn't highly civilized, was hardly passably educated, and keen would be
an inapt word for that queer, remote, woodland mind of hers.... Rodney
r