SUMMER

by Edith Wharton

I

A girl came out of lawyer Royall's house, at the end of

the one street of North Dormer, and stood on the

doorstep.

It was the beginning of a June afternoon. The

springlike transparent sky shed a rain of silver

sunshine on the roofs of the village, and on the

pastures and larchwoods surrounding it. A little wind

moved among the round white clouds on the shoulders of

the hills, driving their shadows across the fields and

down the grassy road that takes the name of street when

it passes through North Dormer. The place lies high

and in the open, and lacks the lavish shade of the more

protected New England villages. The clump of weepingwillows

about the duck pond, and the Norway spruces in

front of the Hatchard gate, cast almost the only

roadside shadow between lawyer Royall's house and the

point where, at the other end of the village, the road

rises above the church and skirts the black hemlock

wall enclosing the cemetery.

The little June wind, frisking down the street, shook

the doleful fringes of the Hatchard spruces, caught the

straw hat of a young man just passing under them, and

spun it clean across the road into the duck-pond.

As he ran to fish it out the girl on lawyer Royall's

doorstep noticed that he was a stranger, that he wore

city clothes, and that he was laughing with all his

teeth, as the young and careless laugh at such mishaps.

Her heart contracted a little, and the shrinking that

sometimes came over her when she saw people with

holiday faces made her draw back into the house and

pretend to look for the key that she knew she had

already put into her pocket. A narrow greenish mirror

with a gilt eagle over it hung on the passage wall, and

she looked critically at her reflection, wished for the

thousandth time that she had blue eyes like Annabel

Balch, the girl who sometimes came from Springfield to

spend a week with old Miss Hatchard, straightened the

sunburnt hat over her small swarthy face, and turned

out again into the sunshine.

"How I hate everything!" she murmured.

The young man had passed through the Hatchard gate, and

she had the street to herself. North Dormer is at all

times an empty place, and at three o'clock on a June

afternoon its few able-bodied men are off in the fields

or woods, and the women indoors, engaged in languid

household drudgery.