"Fancy that", the girl said excitedly, "It's always been one of my dreams to live near a brook yet I never expected I would. Dreams don't often come true, do they? Wouldn't it be nice if they did? But just now I feel almost perfectly happy. I can't feel exactly perfectly happy because, well, what colour would you call this?" The girl twitched one of her long glossy braids over her thin shoulder and held it up before Matthew's eyes. Matthew was not used to deciding on the colour of ladies' hair, but in this case there couldn't be much doubt. "It's red, isn't it?" he said.
The girl let the braid drop back with a sigh that seemed to come from her very toes and to exhale forth all the sorrows of her whole life.
"Yes, it's red," she said resignedly. "Now you see why I can't be perfectly happy. Nobody could who has red hair. I don't mind the other things so much, the freckles, the green eyes and my skinniness. I can imagine them away. I can imagine that I have a beautiful rose-leaf complexion and lovely starry violet eyes. But I CANNOT imagine my red hair away. I do my best. I think to myself, `Now my hair is a glorious black, black as the raven's wing.' But all the time I KNOW it is just plain red and it breaks my heart. It will be my lifelong sorrow. I read of a girl once in a novel who had a lifelong sorrow but it wasn't red hair. Her hair was pure gold rippling back from her alabaster brow. What is an alabaster brow? I never could find out. Can you tell me?" "Well now, I'm afraid I can't," said Matthew, who was beginning to feel a little dizzy. He felt as he had once felt in his youth when another boy had enticed him on the merry-go-round at a picnic.
"Well, whatever it was it must have been something nice," the girl continued, "because she was divinely beautiful. Have you ever imagined what it must feel like to be divinely beautiful?" "Well now, no, I haven't," confessed Matthew. "I have, and often. Which would you rather be if you had the choice, divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good?" "Well now, I--I don't know exactly." "Neither do I. I can never decide. But it doesn't make much real difference for it isn't likely I'll ever be any of them. It's certain I'll never be angelically good. Mrs. Spencer says oh, Mr. Cuthbert! Oh, Mr. Cuthbert! Oh, Mr. Cuthbert!" That was not what Mrs. Spencer had said; neither had the child tumbled out of the buggy nor had Matthew done anything astonishing. They had simply rounded a curve in the road and found themselves in the "Avenue." The "Avenue," as it was called by the Newbridge people, was a stretch of road four or five hundred yards long, completely arched over with huge, wide-spreading apple-trees, planted years ago by an eccentric old farmer. Overhead was one long canopy of snowy fragrant bloom. Below the tree branches, the air was full of purple twilight and far ahead a glimpse of painted sunset sky shone like a great rose window at the end of a cathedral aisle.
Its beauty seemed to strike the child dumb. She leaned back in the buggy, her thin hands clasped before her, her face lifted to the white splendor above. Even when they had passed through and were driving down the long slope to Newbridge she never moved or spoke.
Through the, bustling little village of Newbridge where dogs barked at them and small boys hooted and curious faces peered from the windows, still they drove in silence. When three more miles had dropped away behind them the child had still not spoken. She could keep silent, it was evident, as energetically as she could talk.
