She
stood still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching me as I
came. We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if not in tears.
Her warm hand clasped mine.
"I thought you'd come, Jim. I heard you were at Mrs. Steavens's last
night. I've been looking for you all day."
She was thinner than I had ever seen her, and looked, as Mrs. Steavens
said, "worked down," but there was a new kind of strength in the gravity
of her face, and her color still gave her that look of deep-seated health
and ardor. Still? Why, it flashed across me that though so much had
happened in her life and in mine, she was barely twenty-four years old.
Antonia stuck her fork in the ground, and instinctively we walked toward
that unploughed patch at the crossing of the roads as the fittest place to
talk to each other. We sat down outside the sagging wire fence that shut
Mr. Shimerda's plot off from the rest of the world. The tall red grass had
never been cut there. It had died down in winter and come up again in the
spring until it was as thick and shrubby as some tropical garden-grass. I
found myself telling her everything: why I had decided to study law and to
go into the law office of one of my mother's relatives in New York City;
about Gaston Cleric's death from pneumonia last winter, and the difference
it had made in my life. She wanted to know about my friends and my way of
living, and my dearest hopes.
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