Also, once
removed from the high hills of romance, she was not devoid of
humor.
"It was cut in June--before you came. They didn't want me to, but
I just begged them. It was such a nuisance bathing and then
flopping about drying afterward, and being sent upstairs all day
long to make it smooth."
"You funny kid," he said. "You don't care how you look, do you?
You ought to have been a boy. What have you been doing down here
all by yourself?"
"Reading--and--listening," said Dorothea vaguely. She folded
Godey's Lady Book tightly to her chest. Lady Ursula or no Lady
Ursula, she would have died--with black, bitter shame at the
thought of any eye but her own falling upon the penciled lines
therein. The horror of ridicule is the black shadow that hangs
over youth. That strange, inner world of her own Dorothea shared
with nothing more substantial than her dreams.
"Listening?" he inquired.
"To the ocean," explained Dorothea. "It was high tide when I came
down, and the waves boom-boomed like that, as though it were
saying big words down in its chest, you know."
"And what were the wild waves saying?"
"Oh, big words like--" she thought a moment, her small, sunburnt
face serious and intent.
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