Salad Days

There were, to be sure, other people, girls agreeable, pretty and
edifying, men of their own type and age, older men who did less sport
and more business, but all of these were neither more nor less than a
many-colored background to the little three-cornered intimacy which, as
Dick said, "was the real thing."

It came to be understood that the three should spend their Sunday
afternoons together, not on the cool piazza, where intrusion in its
myriad forms might come upon them, but off somewhere, either on the
bosom of the waters or on the bosom of the good green earth, who
whispers her secret of eternal vitality to every one that lays an ear
close to her heart.

The season was like the placid hour before the world wakes to its daily
comedy and tragedy; and yet, with all its superficial serenity, this
summer carried certain undercurrents of emotion that hardly rose to the
dignity of discontent, but which, nevertheless, troubled the still
waters of the soul. At first Madeline half resented the continual
presence of Norris at these sacred conclaves. He seemed so much an
outsider. Dick she had known all her life and she could talk to him with
perfect freedom, but his friend often sat silent during their chatter,
as though he were an onlooker before whom spontaneity was impossible.
Yet as Sunday after Sunday the two young men strode up together, she
grew to accept Ellery. First he became inoffensive; then she became
aware that his eyes spoke when his lips were dumb; and finally, when
words did come, they were the words of a friend who understood moods and
tenses. In some ways it was a comfort to have this buffer between her
and Dick. It helped to prolong the period of uncertain certainty.