as what each one said: "You've found your
way back at last, have you?"

The old voices of the soil spoke to him. Leaf and bud and blossom
conversed with him in the old vocabulary of his careless youth--the
inanimate things, the familiar stones and rails, the gates and
furrows and roofs and turns of the road had an eloquence, too, and a
power in the transformation. The country had smiled and he had felt
the breath of it, and his heart was drawn as if in a moment back to
his old love. The city was far away.

This rural atavism, then, seized Robert Walmsley and possessed him. A
queer thing he noticed in connection with it was that Alicia, sitting
at his side, suddenly seemed to him a stranger. She did not belong
to this recurrent phase. Never before had she seemed so remote, so
colorless and high--so intangible and unreal. And yet he had never
admired her more than when she sat there by him in the rickety spring
wagon, chiming no more with his mood and with her environment than
the Matterhorn chimes with a peasant's cabbage garden.

That night when the greetings and the supper were over, the entire
family, including Buff, the yellow dog, bestrewed itself upon the
front porch. Alicia, not haughty but silent, sat in the shadow
dressed in an exquisite pale-gray tea gown. Robert's mother
discoursed to her happily concerning marmalade and lumbago. Tom sat
on the top step; Sisters Millie and Pam on the lowest step to catch
the lightning bugs. Mother had the willow rocker. Father sat in the
big armchair with one of its arms gone. Buff sprawled in the middle
of the porch in everybody's way. The twilight pixies and pucks stole
forth unseen and plunged other poignant shafts of memory into the
heart of Robert. A rural madness entered his soul. The city was far
away.

Father sat without his pipe, writhing in his heavy boots, a sacrifice
to rigid courtesy. Robert shouted: "No, you don't!" He fetched the
pipe and lit it; he seized the old gentleman's boots and tore them
off. The last one slipped suddenly, and Mr. Robert Walmsley, of
Washington Square, tumbled off the porch backward with Buff on top of
him, howling fearfully. Tom laughed sarcastically.

Robert tore off his coat and vest and hurled them into a lilac bush.

"Come out here, you landlubber," he cried to Tom, "and I'll put grass
seed on your back. I think you called me a 'dude' a while ago. Come
along and cut your capers."

Tom understood the invitation and accepted