"And you brag of your agility and strength, Jean," she laughingly
remarked; "but you can't take cherries when they are offered to
you. What a clumsy bungler you are."
"I can climb and get some," he said with a hideously happy grin,
and immediately embraced the bole of the tree, up which he began
scrambling almost as fast as a squirrel.
When he had mounted high enough to be extending a hand for a hold
on a crotch, Alice grasped his leg near the foot and pulled him
down, despite his clinging and struggling, until his hands clawed
in the soft earth at the tree's root, while she held his captive
leg almost vertically erect.
It was a show of great strength; but Alice looked quite
unconscious of it, laughing merrily, the dimples deepening in her
plump cheeks, her forearm, now bared to the elbow, gleaming white
and shapely while its muscles rippled on account of the jerking
and kicking of Jean.
All the time she was holding the cherries high in her other hand,
shaking them by the twig to which their slender stems attached
them, and saying in a sweetly tantalizing tone:
"What makes you climb downward after cherries. Jean? What a
foolish fellow you are, indeed, trying to grabble cherries out of
the ground, as you do potatoes! I'm sure I didn't suppose that you
knew so little as that."
Her French was colloquial, but quite good, showing here and there
what we often notice in the speech of those who have been educated
in isolated places far from that babel of polite energies which we
call the world; something that may be described as a bookish cast
appearing oddly in the midst of phrasing distinctly rustic and
local,--a peculiarity not easy to transfer from one language to
another.
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