Her country

Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
BY Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
NEW YORK Charles Scribner’s Sons 1918
Copyright, 1918, by Charles Scribner’s Sons
Copyright, 1918, by the Butterick Publishing Co.
Published May, 1918
HER COUNTRY
Out on the edge of the city were large places, screened from the road by hedges which had been fifty, a hundred years sometimes, in the growing. Behind one such lay a sunshiny garden, lovely in the June Sunday morning. Down the gravel of a path a girl in a white frock walked, swinging a shallow basket in which scissors rattled from side to side. The girl kept a critical eye, walking, on the wall of Dorothy Perkins roses which, growing over a tall broken lattice, separated the garden from the grounds next door.
“You adorable nobodies, you’re like pink music,” she addressed the million little blooms, and halted, erect and poised, glorying in flowers and sunlight.
Two men watched her. “A colt,” spoke the older, smiling lazily.
“I don’t know. I like long, adolescent lines. You don’t see them after eighteen. Honor’s seventeen. I like her figure.”
“Figure! As much figure as a string.” The older man leaned back in his wicker chair and gazed through half-closed lids at the girl, much like a tall, thin angel of Botticelli, shimmering white against shimmering pink.