stands around mooning at the
hollyhocks and petunias and geraniums and things, the flowers that grew
in her garden back East, and I reckon she kind of forgets and thinks
she's a girl back home again. Her face gets all gentled up. I've watched
her when she didn't notice me--she's looking so far off--and when she
goes into the house again her voice is queer, and she forgets to rampage
till Shane Riley lets the stew burn, or Beulah tracks mud into the front
room, or something. I tried to show her there, looking soft, just that
way." He sounded a little apologetic as he finished.

"It's delightful," she insisted, "and they're all good--I can't tell you
how good. You must do more of them, and"--she paused and shot him a
careful glance to determine how wary it behooved her to be--"and I
believe you should let color alone for awhile, until you've had a
teacher show you some things. You must learn the trick."

"Oh, I'd try to learn fast enough, if I had the chance." His eyes
lighted with a kind of furtive wistfulness, as if he would not have her
wholly fathom his longing.

"Of course you could learn. I believe you can do something--something
fine."

She rose from the couch and glanced over his books, with an air of
wishing to touch other matters before they dwelt long on this. She
noticed with some surprise a set of Meredith.

"Do you read these?" she asked, taking down one of the volumes.

There was an instant return of his former shyness, a hint of the child
and the invaded playhouse. But she knew what to do. Without further
remark she calmly lost herself in "Diana."

"Those books were my father's," he said at last, with the air of
addressing an explanation to some third person. She ignored this, not
even glancing at him. "But I've read them," he added, still as if to
another person.

At last, after studying her face a bit, he ventured, "Have you read them
all?" He spoke low, so as not to interrupt her too pointedly. She did
not look up, but nodded, with a smile that said confidentially, "Well, I
should think so!" He edged nearer then, like one who would be glad, if
pressed, to share his secrets.

"I was sorry when I reached the last one," he began. "It was another
world. Oh, he's a great writer. He writes as if he was thinking all the
time in fireworks, and he makes you do the same thing. Every page or two
he sets off a bunch of firecrackers in your mind that you didn't know
you had there. But he writes as if he