"Well, she was roomy, too. She began to lay on flesh after we was married on credit of a hundred acres of Wyantenaug Valley land, came to her from Patton Armitage, till she took a six-by-four coffin, she did, by—"
"Pass on, Pete, pass on. Esther Allen—a—the minister's preference would seem to have argued in her a certain superior attractiveness, a certain—"
"Jus' so. She argued it that way. She'd never believe but what I knew the week the parson had his eye on, an' sort of hurried up and got in underhand. 'Twan't so," said Mr. Paulus, earnestly. "'Twan't so. Didn't know a thing about it till he—"
Thaddeus raised a white hand.
"I beg of you, no more."
In the matter of light on the "subtle sex," what opportunities for study had not Pete Paulus thrown away! Mr. Paulus's drooping left eyelid drooped lower. He heaved with a rumbling chuckle.
It would be not so evil a fate to come to Hagar for the first time, bringing inward wounds to its peculiar balsams. The blue flowers on the green, the lilacs in Widow Bourn's garden. Windless Mountain, that eclectic philosopher, the deep wood avenues, the league length of the Cattle Ridge, the eastern hills where the church spire of Salem village might be seen—one runs easily into cataloguing details, but how convince the inexperienced of their significance, their speech, their daily conversations? Could the children of Hagar tell a stranger the meaning of the mill stream, or ever really explain the moral of the Four Roads? They were not mere objects. They were tangled with living years. One must have seen visions and heard messages. One must have dropped a salt tear by the road-side and sailed that stream to the Celestial City.
And yet it was Mrs. Mavering who seemed to hear the conversations, the meanings, the messages, and not Thaddeus or Helen. Thaddeus was never an instance in point, and Helen was restless. Thaddeus speculated and commented on that restlessness to Mrs. Mavering, who offered few opinions. The impulse and daring which Mrs. Mavering knew as characteristic of Helen's speech seemed to have turned from mental to physical energy, to climbing cliffs instead of merely precipitous ideas. It was as if speech were no longer expressive of facts; as if both were learning an unsyllabled language which the other knew before—Mrs. Mavering learning the language of the rocks and the soil, of growing and flowing things, and Helen the language of human living at a point in its syntax which deals with the more searching idioms, the peculiar question at which point is not merely, "What does this obscure passage mean?" but, "What does it mean to me?" The summer days went like water-drops from the eaves after a rain, that gather and shine and fall swiftly, incessantly. September came, where the green garment of the season runs into embroidery of purple and gold.
The wood-path that runs west from the Cattle Ridge road beyond Job Mather's mill goes by a damp hollow where spotted fungi grow, climbs past bramble patches, clearings, and a bold strip or two of cliff, turns south around a lonely pine-tree, the last of its fellows, down through woods noted for lady-slippers in June, and comes out on the hill meadows along the Red Rock road. You can look south from this wood's edge past the west shoulder of Windless down the Wyantenaug, and to the east see the range of the Great South woods, and near by the spire of the militant church. But Helen and Rachel came there, as a rule, for the sake of the dominance and conversations of Windless.