"Robert F. Young - The Dandelion Girl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

"Do you live near here?" she asked.

"I'm staying in a cabin about three miles back. I'm supposed to be on vacation, but it's not much of one.
My wife was called to jury duty and couldn't come with me, and since I couldn't postpone it, I've ended
up being a sort of reluctant Thoreau. My name is Mark Randolph."

"I'm Julie," she said. "Julie Danvers."

The name suited her. The same way the white dress suited her—the way the blue sky suited her, and the
hill and the September wind. Probably she lived in the little hamlet in the woods, but it did not really
matter. If she wanted to pretend she was from the future, it was all right with him. All that really mattered
was the way he had felt when he had first seen her, and the tenderness that came over him every time he
gazed upon her gentle face. "What kind of work do you do, Julie?" he asked. "Or are you still in
school?"

"I'm studying to be a secretary," she said. She took a half step and made a pretty pirouette and clasped
her hands before her. "I shall just love to be a secretary," she went on. "It must be simply marvelous
working in a big important office and taking down what important people say. Would you like me to be
your secretary, Mr. Randolph?"

"I'd like it very much," he said. "My wife was my secretary once—before the war. That's how we
happened to meet." Now, why had he said that? he wondered.

"Was she a good secretary?"

"The very best. I was sorry to lose her; but then when I lost her in one sense, I gained her in another, so I
guess you could hardly call that losing her."

"No, I guess you couldn't. Well, I must be getting back now, Mr. Randolph. Dad will be wanting to hear
about all the things I saw, and I've got to fix his supper."

"Will you be here tomorrow?"

"Probably. I've been coming here every day. Good-bye now, Mr. Randolph."

"Good-bye, Julie," he said.

He watched her run lightly down the hill and disappear into the grove of sugar maples where, two
hundred and forty years hence, Two Thousand and Fortieth Street would be. He smiled. What a
charming child, he thought. It must be thrilling to have such an irrepressible sense of wonder, such an
enthusiasm for life. He could appreciate the two qualities all the more fully because he had been denied
them. At twenty he had been a solemn young man working his way through law school; at twenty-four he
had had his own practice, and small though it had been, it had occupied him completely—well, not quite
completely. When he had married Anne, there had been a brief interim during which making a living had
lost some of its immediacy. And then, when the war had come along, there had been another interim—a
much longer one this time—when making a living had seemed a remote and sometimes even a
contemptible pursuit. After his return to civilian life, though, the immediacy had returned with a
vengeance, the more so because he now had a son as well as a wife to support, and he had been
occupied ever since, except for the four vacation weeks he had recently been allowing himself each year,
two of which he spent with Anne and Jeff at a resort of their choosing and two of which he spent with