A picnic was spread on the bank and they surrounded it in positions of spiritual abandon. One, a long and somewhat undulant girl, lay among them gazing into the river that rolled peacefully yet dense with clay after the spring flood. The opposite bank, mysterious as an arabesque, hid in its shadow-work of trees the lives that like theirs, had moved back from afternoon; lives bound to the waterway by probing beak and wading leg, by a diet of fish or of insects Whose larval time is passed in mud and water. Look closely! implied the arabesque: a leaf may become a bird
