Part 7 (2/2)

Surely, he had a volume of verse hidden under the old clothes in his trunk. She could have wished that he was even an inventor. She shuddered at the thought of another attempt to set up a shaft to American letters.

The jovial doctor had shaken his fat sides at her. Suddenly she was inspired with forethought. She asked him if he had ever written any verse. He said that once he had been tempted to toss a firebrand into an enemy's wheat-rick, but had never ruined a sheet with measured lines.

She saw that he had caught the spirit of the paragrapher's fling. So this fear was put aside; still, he must be a genius of some sort--an inventor, perhaps. She asked if he had ever invented anything, and he answered, ”Yes, a lie.” This stimulated her interest in him. He was so frank, so refres.h.i.+ng. She had heard that a laborer could be quaintly entertaining. She contrasted him with the numerous men of her acquaintance, men whose sentences were as dried herbs, the sap and the fragrance gone. She was weary of the doctor's shop-talk, the impoverished blood of conversation, the dislocated joint of utterance.

She would have welcomed track talk with a race-horse starter. And the bluntness of this man from the hillside was invigorating. His words were not dry herbs, but fresh pennyroyal, sharp with scent. Milford smiled at her, wis.h.i.+ng that she were locked among her husband's jars of pickled atrocities. He wanted to talk silliness with the girl.

The other boarders came out, George and his wife among them. George handed Milford a cigar, telling him to light it,--that the ladies did not object to smoking.

”You haven't asked them,” said his wife.

”Well, I know they don't.”

”There, don't you see? Mrs. Dorch is moving off.”

George grinned. ”Her husband is a great smoker, and she don't want to be reminded of home,” he said.

”You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she replied.

”I can't afford it. I'm too much loser.”

Mrs. Goodwin asked Gunhild to walk with her. She looked at Milford, but he lost his nerve and did not offer to go with them.

”That was a bid,” said George. His wife reprimanded him. ”It is a wonder you didn't offer to go,” she declared. ”But let us take a walk,” she added.

”Too soon after eating. Believe I'll go up and take a snooze,” he said.

A mother, worn out with hot nights of worrying over the ills of a teething child, sat rocking the little one. Bobbie stood looking on with the critical eye of a boy. ”A baby sticks out his tongue when you wipe his face with a wet rag,” he said, and George snorted. ”What a boy don't see ain't worth seeing,” he said. The boy's mother reached out, drew him to her, and attempted to take from his clenched hands a piece of castiron, a rusty key, and a hog's tooth. ”Throw those nasty things away.”

”Let him keep his tools,” said George. ”A boy can't work without tools.”

He clung to the implements of his trade. She turned him about and set him adrift. ”Mr. Milford,” she said, ”you don't seem to be quite yourself this afternoon. You aren't enjoying yourself.”

He appeared surprised that she should think so. If he were not enjoying himself it was news to him, deserving of a big headline. She saw his eye searching the woods; she thought of the young woman who sighed out her breath at a window far away, waiting for him to hoe out a place for her.

The wreath that she had hung upon him began to wither. After all, he was but a man with a s.h.i.+fting soul, and she did not believe that his talk had morally helped her husband. George was nodding. She shook him, and he looked up quickly, as if he expected a railway conductor to tell him that he was to get off there.

”What makes you so stupid?”

”The beastly weather. Well, I'm going up.”

She sat there rocking herself, with a knife in her bosom for the man who sat near, the deceitful laborer. He was, after all, nothing but a hired man. What could she have expected of him? She was foolish to believe that there was anything spiritual about him. She would give him a dig.

”The young woman whom you were pleased to call a 'peach'----”

”I didn't call her a 'peach'.”

”No matter. The young woman who has been called a 'peach,' with a bouquet of man's promises perfuming her heart, thinks, no doubt, that he is longing to see her again, when, perhaps, he has forgotten her, or remembers her only as a joke. Those foreign girls are so simple.” She looked at him with her drooping eyes. Her fancy rewarded her with the belief that there was a sudden mixture of red in the brown of his face.

”Don't you think she's handsome?” she asked, after waiting for him to speak.

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