hours hurry past at a quite surprising rate when he is with me, and it
grieves me to be obliged to interrupt him in the middle of some quaint
sentence or beautiful thought just because the sun is touching a certain
bush down by the water's edge, which is a sign that it is lunch-time and
that I must be off. Back we go together through the rye, he carefully
tucked under one arm, while with the other I brandish a bunch of grass
to keep off the flies that appear directly we emerge into the sunshine.
"Oh, my dear Thoreau," I murmur sometimes, overcome by the fierce heat
of the little path at noonday and the persistence of the flies, "did you
have flies at Walden to exasperate you? And what became of your
philosophy then?" But he never notices my plaints, and I know that
inside his covers he is discoursing away like anything on the folly of
allowing oneself to be overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool
called a dinner, which is situated in the meridian shallows, and of the
necessity, if one would keep happy, of sailing by it looking another
way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. But he gets grimly carried back for
all that, and is taken into the house and put on his shelf and left
there, because I still happen to have a body attached to my spirit,
which, if not fed at the ordinary time, becomes a nuisance. Yet he is
right; luncheon is a snare of the tempter, and I would perhaps try to
sail by it like Ulysses if I had a biscuit in my pocket to comfort me,
but there are the babies to be fed, and the Man of Wrath, and how can a
respectable wife and mother sail past any meridian shallows in which
those dearest to her have stuck? So I stand by them, and am punished
every day by that two-o'clock-in-the-afternoon feeling to which I so
much object, and yet cannot avoid. It is mortifying, after the sunshiny
morning hours at my pond, when I feel as though I were almost a poet,
and very nearly a philosopher, and wholly a joyous animal in an ecstasy
of love with life, to come back and live through those dreary luncheon-
ridden hours, when the soul is crushed out of sight and sense by cutlets