If May had left them alone deliberately, as he assumed she had—and he honored that generosity in her—she was mistaken in thinking they had anything to say to one another. They had been sitting for some minutes in complete silence, Nettie repacking the remains of the lunch into the picnic basket or, since the accident with the wine, fiddling with her dress. But what could two people talk about after ten years (for it must be getting on to that)? Nettie, though quite chatty throughout lunch, certainly hadn’t said much since. Perhaps she expected him to mention all that business; it would fit in with her sentimental ideas. Naturally, he had no intention of doing anything of the kind—why bring up something that happened at least ten years ago and made all three of them miserable enough, God knows, at the time? Yes, that would be Nettie all over, wanting to be told that he had often thought about her, had never forgotten her, never would—although whole months passed sometimes when Nettie never entered his head, and he was sure it must be the same way for her; at least, he presumed so. Even then, he would remember her only because someone else—May, perhaps—spoke of her.

In fact, it was because someone else brought her to his attention that the thing had come about in the first place. He had not, in the beginning, thought her attractive—a young cousin of May’s who came to the house for weekends in the summer. He had scarcely noticed her until a casual visitor, the wife of one of his partners, spoke about her. A beautiful woman, she had called her—the phrase struck him all the more because he or May would have said, at most, a pretty girl. And Nettie, that day, had been dressed in a crumpled yellow cotton, he remembered—not at her best at all. Later, he had reflected that his whole life had been jeopardized because someone thoughtlessly said: “She is beautiful.”

Now Nettie looked up at him, drawing her hair away from her face with the back of her hand. Still they did not speak, and to make the silence more natural by seeming at his ease Clem stretched on his elbow among the ferns. Nettie released the loop of hair and poured a little water from a thermos onto the mark on her dress. Her earrings swung; her dress shifted along one shoulder. Her head lowered intently—he supposed that she had become shortsighted and refused to wear glasses.