the bicycle tipped.
She dismounted carefully to the left, turning about and holding on to the seat of the bicycle. The lower hem of her skirt was well entangled; she squatted down, still holding the bicycle, and began to work the stuff out of the spokes. Her leg wrappings were collapsing all about her, and she saw that she had to pick those up, too. She was breathing harder than she had ever done.
A voice nearby, a male voice, said, “I haven’t seen a bicycle in this town before,” and she started violently, though she didn’t jump up for fear of rending her skirt. There was a man, quite close by the side of the road, leaning against a leafless maple tree and peeling a staff. He stood up, and then bowed slightly. Margaret nodded, surprised—she hadn’t noticed him on her way up the hill. He was tall and handsomely dressed, in a gray suit of clothes, with a soft gray hat sitting squarely on his head. Every man she knew wore a hat, and you could tell quite a bit about a man by the way he wore his hat—slouched forward, pushed back, rakishly tilted to the right or to the left. This hat was like the roof on a steeple—as square as if it had been positioned with instruments. With this thought, she recognized him as the young man in the paper, at the parade, who had changed the universe. Unfortunately, though, her skirt was still jammed between the spokes, and her fingers were too clumsy in her gloves to pull it out. She said (politely, thinking of how often Lavinia had criticized her manner with strangers), “I believe this is the first, but it won’t be around much longer, as we must return it to its owner in St. Louis.”
He seemed to peer at her, but did not lean forward. He looked as if leaning in any direction whatsoever was impossible for him.
He said, “We haven’t been introduced, but may I be of assistance?”
Her skirt slipped from between the spokes, not terribly blackened after all. She stood up, then had to bend down and gather up the strips of flannel she had wrapped her legs with. She said, “No, we haven’t been introduced, but I recognize you from the paper, Mr. Early. I’m Margaret Mayfield. Have you ridden a bicycle?”
“When I was studying in Berlin, I rode a bicycle quite often, but it was not nearly as nice as this one. I haven’t had occasion to ride one, though, in some years.”
“I understand it’s the latest model.” She looked around for a spot to sit down, a rock or a stump, so that she could rewrap her legs, but it appeared she would have to walk the bicycle to Mrs. Larimer’s, at least half a mile, and reorganize her outfit there. Mr. Early said, “My bicycle in Germany had a roomy basket attached to the handlebars. Most convenient.”
“That would be,” she said. She paired her flannels and draped them over her shoulder, then wrapped them around her waist so they would be out of the way. She wheeled the bicycle forward, and he fell into step beside her. Though the bicycle was between them, she felt how tall he was, at least a head taller than she was, and on top of that there was the hat.
Margaret detested most company other than the company of books; however, she adjusted her own hat and walked on in as congenial a manner as she could. Mr. Early in the flesh looked younger than Mr. Early in Robert’s paper, but she recognized the eyes and the brow—not those of a conversationalist. It appeared that she was obliged to walk to Mrs. Larimer’s with a man who would have to be chatted to, rather than one who was happy to do the chatting. Just then, out of what Lavinia would have called her “orneriness,” she vowed not to do it, no matter how lengthy the silence. As an alternative, she reviewed her recent headlong progress on the bicycle, and found it as exhilarating in retrospect as it had been while she was enjoying and enduring it. She took a hand off the handlebars and touched her cheeks with the tips of her fingers. They were stiff with dried, or frozen, tears. She put her hand back on the handlebars. It made her smile to think of having gone so fast.
They walked on, and he said nothing. Undoubtedly, she could return home by