He was so the viking in his bigness that once, on a picnic, he had
carried two girls, screaming their fun, across twenty feet of stream.
Hester was one of them.

It was at this picnic, the Finley annual, that he asked Hester, then
seventeen, to marry him. She was darkly, wildly pretty, as a rambler
rose tugging at its stem is restlessly pretty, as a pointed little
gazelle smelling up at the moon is whimsically pretty, as a runaway
stream from off the flank of a river is naughtily pretty, and she wore
a crisp percale shirt waist with a saucy bow at the collar, fifty-cent
silk stockings, and already she had almond incarnadine nails with points
to them.

They were in the very heart of Wallach's Grove, under a natural
cathedral of trees, the noises of the revelers and the small explosions
of soda-water and beer bottles almost remote enough for perfect quiet.
He was stretched his full and splendid length at the picknickers'
immemorial business of plucking and sucking grass blades, and she seated
very trimly, her little blue-serge skirt crawling up ever so slightly to
reveal the silken ankle, on a rock beside him.

"Tickle-tickle!" she cried, with some of that irrepressible animal
spirit of hers, and leaning to brush his ear with a twig.

He caught at her hand.

"Hester," he said, "marry me."

She felt a foaming through her until her finger tips sang.