“Why, you dear silly old thing!” exclaimed Olive, “I do believe you’ll have omens next, and will look into tea-cups to see if it is a propitious moment for the success of this undertaking. I never knew you ‘take on’ like this before.”
“I never did so, but it is all because I love you, dear. I quite understand what it means, to be foolish with love. I used not to know what it was. I wonder do women ever feel the same as we men do?”
“Women, my dear, are sent into this world for the express purpose of making men do what they ought and not be silly,” said Olive severely. “Now I know you’ll have the feed for the horses all right, but remember the feed for yourself is in this basket, everything you’ll want, and there is salt for the boiled eggs.”
When the hurry of getting the waggons off was over, Olive sat down to think, and immediately there rose up before her the image of a hunted man flying for his life. In some ways it was a relief that Ezra was gone, she would not have to be constantly making an effort to hide the real anxiety in her mind. Then she thought of Ezra and of his great and boundless devotion to her, and the words Madame had spoken in her wrath rose up before her and rebuked her. Were they true? Had she hidden her real nature from her husband before her marriage? She had never meant to do so, but in their long pre-nuptial conversations it had not appeared to her that she and Ezra were so different in their views of life and its duties as perhaps was now the case. He certainly had told her of the experiment of Perfection City, and she had accepted him and the experiment together because they were indissoluble. She of herself would never have initiated the communistic idea; but then there was nothing wonderful in that, woman never do initiate anything, they only follow some man’s lead with more or less enthusiasm and intelligence.
Were she to have expressed her own private predilection, it certainly would have been for a little home of her own on the usual lines, which little home it would have been her pride and her pleasure to make as beautiful as she could. Olive did not possess a large and speculative mind, capable of vast dreamy projects, whose limitless possibilities were in imagination not checked by small practical obstacles. On the contrary, it was the tendency of her intellect to perceive those obstacles with startling clearness, and to demonstrate, by a few biting truisms, the impossibility of turning the dreamy vastnesses to use. She was neither hard-headed nor dull-headed, but hers was a practical nature, very much jarred by idle vapourings, and above all she was kept in the straight path of common sense by her keen appreciation of the ridiculous.
This faculty enabled her to perceive how often reformers run off the track of common sense, and while pinning their faith to one particular little tenet which they constitute the corner-stone of their philosophy, lose sight of the whole world beyond. Olive possessed in a high degree the sense of proportion, which in a true reformer is generally absent. When Ezra with his cultivated mind and really fine intellect, talked to her of the reforming of the present type of civilization, and briefly sketched out what he hoped would be the result of the introduction of the communistic idea into life, she could not help remarking that he used very much the same expressions, and seemed animated by very much the same hopes, as those indulged in by one of the dietetic reformers she knew in Smyrna, who promised all the glories of the golden age to mankind if the human race would only give up the baneful practices of eating meat and of cooking vegetables!
And every few minutes, across the mirror of her reflections, there came a shadow of a desperate man spurring on a jaded horse. Olive could not shake off a sense of impending disaster, but unlike Ezra, who attributed his melancholy to his great love for Olive and a vague, unreasoning dread of something happening to her in his absence, she knew quite well what she feared and why.
As the morning wore on, Olive began to feel it impossible to remain quietly at home in the midst of her anxiety. She must go out and hear what news there was, or at all events she must learn if there was any news. Resolved not to hold any communication with Madame other than what was publicly necessary—for between the two there was now maintained a sort of armed neutrality—she decided to call at the blacksmith’s, as Brother Green was in the way of most of the gossip, if gossip is a term that could be rightly applied to the feeble and intermittent stream of prairie news that trickled through the smithy. Brother Green was a silent, self-absorbed man who worked steadily and brought much personal devotion into the project of Perfection City. He was a lonely man, a widower, and to judge by appearances a disappointed man as well. He was surprised to see Sister Olive, and very pleased, but could not shake hands as he was very dirty, and she looked so brightly clean. Having wiped a wooden bench with his leather apron and again with the sleeve of his shirt, he invited her to be seated. Brother Green was welding some iron, and Olive waited until the operation was concluded and the plough-hook made before she talked to him. Meanwhile she watched with interest the white glowing fire and the pulpy white-hot iron-bar, helplessly bending over at the end like a piece of half boiled molasses candy.
“I felt so lonesome, I thought I would come out and talk to someone,” she said, by way of excuse for a first visit. “Diana isn’t a bit of company when you feel really lonesome. Ezra is gone for four days, did you know?”
Diana had cocked one ear at the mention of her name, but had speedily uncocked it again on becoming satisfied that nothing in the way of excitement was at hand.