xcept the exact relation of the elderly
invalid to whose care you gave up so generously so much of your life;
I'm not sure whether I she was an aunt or a second-cousin." She paused
an instant to give them a chance to comment on this, but finding them
still quite speechless, she went on. "And now I know another thing, that
you like gladioli, and that is a real bond."

She was interrupted here by a great explosive laugh from Vincent. It was
his comment on her speech to them, and for a time he made no other,
eyeing her appreciatively as she and Mr. Welles talked garden together,
and from time to time chuckling to himself. She gave him once a sidelong
amused glance, evidently liking his capacity to laugh at seeing the
ground cut away from under his feet, evidently quite aware that he was
still thinking about that, and not at all about Mr. Welles and
tulip-beds. Welles was relieved at this. Apparently she was going to
"take" Vincent the right way. Some ladies were frightfully rubbed the
wrong way by that strange great laugh of Vincent's. And what she knew
about gardening! And not only about gardening in general, but about his
own garden. He was astounded at her knowledge apparently of every inch
of the quadrangle of soil back of his house, and at the revelations she
made to him of what could lie sleeping under a mysterious blank surface
of earth. Why, a piece of old ground was like a person. You had to know
it, to have any idea of all that was hidden in its bosom, good and bad.
"There never was such a place for pigweed as the lower end of your
vegetable lot," she told him; "you'll have to get up nights to fight it
if there is plenty of rain this summer." And again, "Be careful about
not digging too close to the east wall of your terrace. There is a
border of peonies there, splendid pink ones, and you're likely to break
off the shoots. They don't show so early as the red ones near the walk,
that get more sun."

"Did you ever use to _live_ in that house?" he asked her, respectful of
her mastery of its secrets.

She laughed. "No, oh no. We've lived right here all the eleven years of
our life in Vermont. But there's another side to the local wireless
information-bureau that let me know all about you before you ever got
here. We all know all about everybody and everything, you know. If you
live in the country you're really married to humanity, for better or for
worse, not just on speaking terms with it, as you are in the city.