From Four to Five

And so when everything that he had found grotesque, illogical,
laboured, obvious, and clamorously redundant in literature and the
drama began to happen and continued to happen in real life to him--and
went on happening and involving himself and others all around him in
the pleasant July sunshine of 1914, this young man, made
intellectually blasé, found himself without sufficient capacity to
comprehend it.

There was another matter with which his mind was struggling as he lay
there, his head cradled on one elbow, watching the thin blue spirals
from his cigarette mount straight to the ceiling, and that was the
metamorphosis of Rue Carew.

Where was the thin girl he remembered--with her untidy chestnut hair
and freckles, and a rather sweet mouth--dressed in garments the only
mission of which was to cover a flat chest and frail body and limbs
whose too rapid growth had outstripped maturity?

To search for her he went back to the beginning, where a little girl
in a pink print dress, bare-legged and hatless, loitered along an
ancient rail fence and looked up shyly at him as he warned her to keep
out of range of the fusillade from the bushes across the pasture.

He thought of her again at the noisy party in Gayfield on that white
night in winter; visualised the tall, shy, overgrown girl who danced
with him and made no complaint when her slim foot was trodden on. And
again he remembered the sleigh and the sleighbells clashing and
tinkling under the moon; the light from her doorway, and how she stood
looking back at him; and how, on the mischievous impulse of the
moment, he had gone back and kissed her---At the memory an odd sensation came over him, scaring him a little.
How on earth had he ever had the temerity to do such a thing to her!