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been as far as Mr. Wheeler's timber claim and back. It was like an autumn afternoon, so warm that they left
their overcoats on the limb of a crooked elm by the pasture fence. The fields and the bare tree-tops seemed to
be swimming in light. A few brown leaves still clung to the bushy trees along the creek. In the upper pasture,
more than a mile from the house, the boys found a bittersweet vine that wound about a little dogwood and
covered it with scarlet berries. It was like finding a Christmas tree growing wild out of doors. They had just
been talking about some of the books Claude had brought home, and his history course. He was not able to
tell Ernest as much about the lectures as he had meant to, and he felt that this was more Ernest's fault than his
own; Ernest was such a literal-minded fellow. When they came upon the bittersweet, they forgot their
discussion and scrambled down the bank to admire the red clusters on the woody, smoke-coloured vine, and
its pale gold leaves, ready to fall at a touch. The vine and the little tree it honoured, hidden away in the cleft of
a ravine, had escaped the stripping winds, and the eyes of schoolchildren who sometimes took a short cut
home through the pasture. At its roots, the creek trickled thinly along, black between two jagged crusts of
melting ice.
When they left the spot and climbed back to the level, Claude again felt an itching to prod Ernest out of his
mild and reasonable mood.
"What are you going to do after a while, Ernest? Do you mean to farm all your life?"
"Naturally. If I were going to learn a trade, I'd be at it before now. What makes you ask that?"
"Oh, I don't know! I suppose people must think about the future sometime. And you're so practical."
"The future, eh?" Ernest shut one eye and smiled. "That's a big word. After I get a place of my own and have a
good start, I'm going home to see my old folks some winter. Maybe I'll marry a nice girl and bring her back."
"Is that all?"
"That's enough, if it turns out right, isn't it?"
"Perhaps. It wouldn't be for me. I don't believe I can ever settle down to anything. Don't you feel that at this
rate there isn't much in it?"
"In what?"
"In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it? Take a day like this: you waken up in the
morning and you're glad to be alive; it's a good enough day for anything, and you feel sure something will
happen. Well, whether it's a workday or a holiday, it's all the same in the end. At night you go to bed--nothing
has happened."
"But what do you expect? What can happen to you, except in your own mind? If I get through my work, and
get an afternoon off to see my friends like this, it's enough for me."
One of Ours 23
"Is it? Well, if we've only got once to live, it seems like there ought to be something--well, something
splendid about life, sometimes."
Ernest was sympathetic now. He drew nearer to Claude as they walked along and looked at him sidewise with
concern. "You Americans are always looking for something outside yourselves to warm you up, and it is no
way to do. In old countries, where not very much can happen to us, we know that,--and we learn to make the
most of little things."
"The martyrs must have found something outside themselves. Otherwise they could have made themselves
comfortable with little things."
"Why, I should say they were the ones who had nothing but their idea! It would be ridiculous to get burned at
the stake for the sensation. Sometimes I think the martyrs had a good deal of vanity to help them along, too."
Claude thought Ernest had never been so tiresome. He squinted at a bright object across the fields and said
cuttingly, "The fact is, Ernest, you think a man ought to be satisfied with his board and clothes and Sundays
off, don't you?"
Ernest laughed rather mournfully. "It doesn't matter much what I think about it; things are as they are. Nothing
is going to reach down from the sky and pick a man up, I guess."
Claude muttered something to himself, twisting his chin about over his collar as if he had a bridle-bit in his
mouth.
The sun had dropped low, and the two boys, as Mrs. Wheeler watched them from the kitchen window, seemed
to be walking beside a prairie fire. She smiled as she saw their black figures moving along on the crest of the
hill against the golden sky; even at that distance the one looked so adaptable, and the other so unyielding.
They were arguing, probably, and probably Claude was on the wrong side.
IX
After the vacation Claude again settled down to his reading in the University Library. He worked at a table
next the alcove where the books on painting and sculpture were kept. The art students, all of whom were girls,
read and whispered together in this enclosure, and he could enjoy their company without having to talk to
them. They were lively and friendly; they often asked him to lift heavy books and portfolios from the shelves,
and greeted him gaily when he met them in the street or on the campus, and talked to him with the easy
cordiality usual between boys and girls in a co-educational school. One of these girls, Miss Peachy Millmore,
was different from the others,--different from any girl Claude had ever known. She came from Georgia, and
was spending the winter with her aunt on B street.
Although she was short and plump, Miss Millmore moved with what might be called a "carriage," and she had
altogether more manner and more reserve than the Western girls. Her hair was yellow and curly,--the short
ringlets about her ears were just the colour of a new chicken. Her vivid blue eyes were a trifle too prominent,
and a generous blush of colour mantled her cheeks. It seemed to pulsate there,-one had a desire to touch her
cheeks to see if they were hot. The Erlich brothers and their friends called her "the Georgia peach." She was
considered very pretty, and the University boys had rushed her when she first came to town. Since then her
vogue had somewhat declined.
Miss Millmore often lingered about the campus to walk down town with Claude. However he tried to adapt
his long stride to her tripping gait, she was sure to get out of breath. She was always dropping her gloves or
her sketchbook or her purse, and he liked to pick them up for her, and to pull on her rubbers, which kept
slipping off at the heel. She was very kind to single him out and be so gracious to him, he thought. She even
One of Ours 24
coaxed him to pose in his track clothes for the life class on Saturday morning, telling him that he had "a
magnificent physique," a compliment which covered him with confusion. But he posed, of course.
Claude looked forward to seeing Peachy Millmore, missed her if she were not in the alcove, found it quite
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