The tableau
is not merely rustic, it is primitive. "Jump!" the girl is saying
in French, "jump, Jean; jump high!"
Yes, that was very long ago, in the days when women lightly braved
what the strongest men would shrink from now.
Alice Roussillon was tall, lithe, strongly knit, with an almost
perfect figure, judging by what the master sculptors carved for
the form of Venus, and her face was comely and winning, if not
absolutely beautiful; but the time and the place were vigorously
indicated by her dress, which was of coarse stuff and simply
designed. Plainly she was a child of the American wilderness, a
daughter of old Vincennes on the Wabash in the time that tried
men's souls.
"Jump, Jean!" she cried, her face laughing with a show of cheek-
dimples, an arching of finely sketched brows and the twinkling of
large blue-gray eyes.
"Jump high and get them!"
While she waved her sun-browned hand holding the cherries aloft,
the breeze blowing fresh from the southwest tossed her hair so
that some loose strands shone like rimpled flames. The sturdy
little hunchback did leap with surprising activity; but the
treacherous brown hand went higher, so high that the combined
altitude of his jump and the reach of his unnaturally long arms
was overcome. Again and again he sprang vainly into the air
comically, like a long-legged, squat-bodied frog.
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