" Sidney added, contentedly.
"It's my captured dream, my own home and garden!" With her head resting
against one of the pillars of the porch, her eyes dreamily moving from
the hills to the sky and over the quiet woods, she went on
thoughtfully: "You know I never had a home, Barry; and when I visited
here, I began to realize what I was missing. How I longed for Santa
Paloma, the creek, and the woods, and my little sunny room after I went
away! But even when I was eighteen, and we took a house in Washington,
what could I do? I 'came out,' you know. I loved gowns and parties
then, as I hope the girls will some day; but I knew all the while it
wasn't living." She paused, but Barry did not speak. "And, then, before
I was twenty, I was married," Sidney went on presently, "and we started
off for St. Petersburg. And after that, for years and years, I posed
for dressmakers; I went the round of jewelers, and milliners, and
manicures; I wrote notes and paid calls. I let one strange woman come
in every day and wash my hands for me, and another wash my hair, and a
third dress me! I let men--who were in the business simply to make
money, and who knew how to do it!--tell me that my furs must be recut,
or changed, and my jewels reset, and my wardrobe restocked and my
furniture carried away and replaced. And in the cities we lived in it's
horrifying to see how women slave, and toil, and worry to keep up. Half
the women I knew were sick over debts and the necessity for more debts.
I felt like saying, with Carlyle, 'Your chaos-ships must excuse me';
I'm going back to Santa Paloma, to wear my things as long as they are
whole and comfortable, and do what I want to do with my spare time!"

"You missed your playtime," Barry said; "now you make the most of it."

"Oh, no!" she answered, giving him a glimpse of serious eyes in the
half-dark, "playtime doesn't come back. But, at least, I know what I
want to do, and it will be more fun than any play. One of the wisest
men I ever knew set me thinking of these things. He's a sculptor, a
great sculptor, and he lives in an olive garden in Italy, and eats what
his peasants eat, and befriends them, and stands for their babies in
baptism, and sits with them when they're dying. My father and I visited
him about two years ago, and one day when he and I were taking a tramp,
I suddenly burst out that I envied him. I wanted to live in an olive
garden, too, and wear faded blue clothes, and eat grapes, and tram