Carl was cheerful as their wheels
crunched the dirt roads in a long, crisp hum. The stilly rhythm of
frogs drowned the clank of their pedals, and the sky was vast and pale
and wistful.

Gertie, however, seemed less cheerful.

On the last evening of his stay in Joralemon Gertie gave him a
hay-ride party. They sang "Seeing Nelly Home," and "Merrily We Roll
Along," and "Suwanee River," and "My Old Kentucky Home," and "My
Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," and "In the Good Old Summertime," under a
delicate new moon in a sky of apple-green. Carl pressed Gertie's hand;
she returned the pressure so quickly that he was embarrassed. He
withdrew his hand as quickly as possible, ostensibly to help in the
unpacking of the basket of ginger-ale and chicken sandwiches and three
cakes (white-frosted, chocolate layer, and banana cake).

The same group said good-by to Carl at the M. & D. station. As the
train started, Carl saw Gertie turn away disconsolately, her shoulders
so drooping that her blouse was baggy in the back. He mourned that he
had not been more tender with her that week. He pictured himself
kissing Gertie on the shore of Tamarack Lake, enfolded by afternoon
and the mystery of sex and a protecting reverence for Gertie's
loneliness. He wanted to go back--back for one more day, one more ride
with Gertie. But he picked up a mechanics magazine, glanced at an
article on gliders, read in the first paragraph a prophecy about
aviation, slid down in his seat with his head bent over the
magazine--and the idyl of Gertie and afternoon was gone.

He was reading the article on gliders in June, 1905, so early in the
history of air conquest that its suggestions were miraculous to him;
for it was three years before Wilbur Wright was to startle the world
by his flights at Le Mans; four years before Bleriot was to cross the
Channel--though, indeed, it was a year and a half after the Wrights'
first secret ascent in a motor-driven aeroplane at Kittyhawk, and
fourteen years after Lilienthal had begun that epochal series of
glider-flights which was followed by the experiments of Pilcher and
Chanute, Langley and Montgomery.

The article declared that if gasoline or alcohol engines could be made
light enough we should all be aviating to the office in ten years;
that now was the time for youngsters to practise gliding, as pioneers
of the new age. Carl "guessed" that flying would be even better than
automobiling. He made designs for three revolutiona