Adam's garden Author:Nina Wilcox Putnam Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Further Adventures Into Poverty For a long time Adam stood gazing after her. Up, up she arose, until the aeroplane hung like a sea-gull above t... more »he silver river. So white it was, that he could scarcely distinguish it against the drifting clouds, save for the dark spot of her figure in its midst. When she had risen three hundred feet or more, she swerved sharply to the north, and sped textit{off along the course of the Hudson. Adam stayed transfixed, until the plane, growing smaller and smaller, had quite vanished from sight. Evidently she was accustomed to making long flights! Feeling that to wait for her return would be both futile and objectless, he reluctantly turned his eyes from the grey spot where she had vanished, and strove to fix his attention on the street again. Jove! what nerve she had, and what skill! It seemed strange and rather wonderful that a woman should do such a thing. But somehow it seemed very right that textit{she should, so slim and strong she looked, so poised and competent and real. He thought of the girls he had known, passing them in swift review. The carefully limited, painstakingly ignorant girls of his own set, deliberately trained to uselessness by their mothers; reared in luxury; but shamed out of any semblance of genuine human passions or deep emotions. He had never felt it so strongly before: indeed he had even been amusedly tolerant of them. . . . But that little aviatrix! She was the first woman he had ever seen as a woman, in the full sense of the word?as a live human being! Bah! What nonsense! She was probably mannish, hard and unattractive when you got to know her. Suddenly he remembered Breckenridge and the fact that his cousin, who had a very pretty taste in women, had taken this " hard, mannish " person to supper at Rector...« less