"You know some more?" Dave asked. He liked it, too—with her. It was pagan philosophy and the verse of a voluptuary; Dave had heard his father call anathema upon the poem which extolled pleasure as the greatest good in life.
"A lot of it," Fidelia said. "I love it. I've the book with the Vedder drawings. He has a wonderful page opposite those verses—some one seated on Saturn with the rings below him and all the worlds whirling about.
"'And that inverted Bowl they call the sky,'"
she quoted,
"'Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die,
Lift not your hands to It—for It
As impotently rolls as you and I.'"
Dave asked her: "Do you think that?"
"Why, I don't feel cooped at all. Do you?"
"No," said Dave and smiled in the starlight. She never bothered about the big idea of her verses, or of any other matter, he noticed. She liked them for the sensation they supplied. And he liked that in her.
He was light-minded and happy. He thought that his shore self would hardly know this Dave Herrick who walked the floe with Fidelia Netley. The boy, who had played with her in the ice caves, would know him; this David Herrick was that boy who now knew Fidelia much better. They had talked together a thousand things; and with each, Fidelia had more delighted him.
