This Proud Heart by Pearl S. Buck Read Free Book Online

with me!”
    He got up abruptly and came over to her and kissed her. “Why do you sit so far away from me?” he asked, and pulled her chair beside his. “Let’s sit side by side, always.”
    Somewhere she had read that love was a force which expanded the being. People who had not known they could do anything wrote poems or music or undertook great tasks when they were in love. But it was not so with her. She drew Mark’s love about her like a close and warmly enfolding cloak, and did nothing great, even in dreams. She did not once go to the attic or think even of her modeling. Her hands were satisfied to do the work of this house she loved better every day. When she had made it fresh and had added to it every beauty she could devise and imagine, setting forth every possession into its most perfect place, then she would go into the kitchen, and poring over a cookbook, she would plan and make. When everything was finished, she waited, full of content, and satisfied in her own being, until Mark came home. She built his love about her like the walls of the small house on the edge of the wood.
    Of the wood she was always aware. It was a deceptive wood. It seemed, at the end of the street, like a shallow spread of trees, but once entered it went on for miles, unexpectedly tangled and deep, over ground too rough and rocky to tempt clearing for a farm. There was a stream, after a while, running darkly at the bottom of a chasm of wet black rock, and then the wood went on again.
    Mark hated the wood. She had led him there last Sunday afternoon and he had tramped doggedly along beside her in silence.
    “Isn’t it beautiful?” she said, lifting her face to the shadowy trees, dark now with midsummer fullness.
    “It makes me feel queer,” he said. “How was it I didn’t see it that day when I asked you to marry me? I didn’t see anything that day but you.”
    A loneliness fell upon them, although they were walking hand in hand. They came to the stream and looked down upon it, flowing upon black rock.
    “It must have taken a million years for it to cut a gash like that in this hard rock,” Mark said, and immediately the loneliness of a million years was added to them. They stood staring down and suddenly a crash and a roar burst up from the chasm. A little further down the bank, where the stream curved, a loosened rock had fallen into the stream. It settled, trailing lesser rocks and earth and small trees, and after a boiling moment, the water parted smoothly and flowed on either side, and the rock stood as though from ages.
    “Let’s go home,” said Mark. “We’ve come too deep into it. I’ve always heard stories about this place.”
    “You said once you were not afraid here with me,” she reminded him.
    “I’m not afraid anyway,” he retorted. “Only why not walk in the sunshine?”
    So they had turned homeward. When they came out of the twilight of the trees, the sun was still high in the street. They could see people coming back from golf, from picnics. A few blocks away Lucile and Hal were coming home, Tommy walking sturdily between them. Lucile waved and Hal shouted, “Missed you folks at the club today!”
    Mark waved his hat and Susan her hand and they went up their own steps.
    “We ought to get around to the club once in a while,” Mark said. “We don’t want folks to think we’re stuck up.”
    “Oh, they wouldn’t,” she said warmly. “They know us.”
    She forgot them and went into the kitchen singing, and set about supper.
    “All the same,” said Mark a few minutes later, “it’s easy to get folks thinking you’re stuck up, Sue, especially when you’re the sort of person you are.”
    She stopped her slicing of an orange for fruit salad. She had been thinking how exquisite was the making of an orange, the segments of tiny drops of enclosed color. She stood, holding nothing but an orange, staring at Mark.
    “Why, what do you mean?” she asked, wondering.
    Her face was flushed and she