She was
shuddering with chill and repeating to herself, quite aloud and over and
over again:
"What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?"
She was suddenly silent then, staring out ahead, her hands clutching the
chair-arms.
To her inflamed fancy, it was as if, beyond the hedge, the old disused
hitching-post had become incarnate and, in the form of her naive and
horned conception, was coming toward her with the whites of his eyes
bloodshot.
A PETAL ON THE CURRENT
Were I only swifter and more potent of pen, I could convey to you all in
the stroke of a pestle the H2O, the pigment of the red-cheeked apple,
the blue of long summer days, and the magnesia of the earth for which
Stella Schump was the mortal and mortar receptacle.
She was about as exotic as a flowering weed which can spring so strongly
and so fibrously from slack. And yet such a weed can bleed milk. If
Stella Schump was about fourteen pounds too plump, too red of cheek, and
too blandly blue of eye, there was the very milk of human kindness in
her morning punching up of her mother's pillows and her smoothing down
of the gray and poorly hair. She could make a bed freshly, whitely, her
strong young arms manoeuvering under but not even jarring the poor old
form so often prone there.
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