There were both men and women in the party and the women had on white dresses. It was charming to watch them moving in and out among the green trees and one of them came down to the river's edge and, putting one foot in a boat that was drawn up on the bank, and with the other on the bank itself, she leaned over to fill a pitcher with water. There was herself and her reflection in the water, seen faintly, even from this distance. There was a going together and a coming apart. The two white figures opened and closed like a delicately tinted shell.

Young Webster on the hill had not looked at his bride and they were both silent, but he was becoming almost insanely excited. Was she thinking the thoughts he was thinking? Had her nature also opened itself, as had his?

It was becoming impossible to keep things straight in the mind. What was he thinking and what was she thinking and feeling? Far away in the wood across the river the white figures of women were moving about among the trees. The men of the picnic party, with their darker clothes could no longer be discerned. One no longer thought of them. The white clad women's figures were being woven in and out among the sturdy upstanding trunks of the trees.

There was a woman on the hill behind him and she was his bride. Perhaps she was having just such thoughts as himself. That must be true. She was a woman and young and she would be afraid, but there came a time when fear must be put aside. One was a male and at the proper time went towards the female and took her. There was a kind of cruelty in nature and at the proper time that cruelty became a part of one's manhood.

He closed his eyes and rolling over to his belly got to his hands and knees. If one stayed longer lying quietly at her feet there would be a kind of insanity. Already there was too much anarchy within. "At the moment of death all of life passes before a man." What a silly notion. "What about the moment of the coming of life?"

He was on his knees like an animal, looking at the ground, not yet looking at her. With all the strength of his being he tried to tell his daughter of the meaning of that moment in his life.

"How shall I say how I felt? Perhaps I should have been a painter or a singer. My eyes were closed and within myself were all the sights, sounds, smells, feeling of the world of the valley into which I had been looking. Within myself I comprehended all things, everything.

"Things came in flashes, in colours. First there were the yellows, the golden shining yellow things, not yet born. The yellows were little streaks of shining colour buried down with the dark blues and blacks of the soil. The yellows were things not yet born, not yet come into the light. They were yellow because they were not yet green. Soon the yellows would combine with the dark colours in the earth and spring forth into a world of colour. There would be a sea of colour, running in waves, splashing over everything. Spring would come, within the earth, within me too."