She had planned to continue further down the slope, but the slatted red bench in a sun-flooded bend of the path had proved too great an adventure. It was an adventure because it was there at all, demanding nothing, feigning indifference, and promising the secret pleasures of truancy. The wood was warm to her touch. The three hundred pages of The Machining of Plastics in their neatly tied folder remained unedited at her side, and in the late afternoon light, bright but no longer hot, Judith continued to look with pleasure through the opening in the trees at the sunny cliff with its gazebo of pale, peeled logs, and beyond to the dark green and light green and blue green of low hills. On the hills lay darker green patches that slowly moved: the shadows of clouds. They looked like carelessly strewn dark doilies. A young woman in faded blue jeans and a crimson T-shirt lay on her back on the cliff. Her boyfriend sat crosslegged beside her, drinking a can of beer that flashed in the sun. His shadow was so richly black that it might have been wet. They spoke, but quietly, as if hushed by the peacefulness of the view, and Judith would not have wished them to leave. It struck her, watching their stillness, that there was also a pleasurable truancy from play. One of the attractions of the place was its twenty-seven, or was it twenty-nine, scenic trails, and it was possible to feel much too responsible for covering the territory. She had been marching up and down trails all morning and half the afternoon, looking down at valleys with red barns and across at hills with little white houses, identifying fourteen wildflowers with the aid of Peterson’s Field Guide to the Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-central North America and a four-page pamphlet she had bought for ninety-five cents at the gift shop near the dining room, resting only for a few minutes in the rustic gazebos placed along the cliff trails before setting off again, and she realized, seated gratefully on her bench, how delightful it was simply to stop. Simply to stop. At her feet grew a purple wildflower, with four-petaled clusters arranged along the upper part of a thick green stalk, and she purposely refrained from opening her shoulder bag and checking in the purple section of the field guide. The warm sun on her face made her feel healthy and sleepy. Flower, tree, rock, sky—for a moment Judith longed for a world without detail. It would be enough.