Late in that summer there were several weeks when one perfect day followed another like a child's dream of fairy-land. Vaughan wished to work alone, dropped completely out of their life, was forgotten. Every day, all day long, she and Basil were together, he helping her at the pastime that kept house and grounds beautiful. She was one of those human beings who abhor disorder; if anything went wrong it was righted at once. If a knob came off a door or a plant withered, she could not rest until the imperfection was remedied. It kept her incessantly occupied, but the results were worth the pains they cost. Her imagination, stimulated by Basil, planned many changes in grounds and gardens, changes that would bring the place still nearer the landscape artist's three ideals—contrast, variety, bounds concealed. And she and Basil together carried out these alterations.
Then there were the leisure hours, as full as the hours of toil. They—with Winchie—strolled in the woods on the farm, across the highway, and picnicked under the trees beside the brook, or in the shadow of some gigantic fern-covered rock left on a hillside by the retreating glaciers of the ice age. Or, they went out on the lake, Winchie fishing, she and Gallatin talking in low tones or happy in sympathetic silence, with the boat moving languidly where the shadows of the great weeping willows were deepest, its keel troubling the dark clear waters hardly more than a floating leaf.
She was fond of talking, he of listening. And she had so many things to say—the things that had been accumulating in those five years when she had said little, had read and thought much. When Basil did talk it was usually of what he had experienced in his wanderings over Europe and Asia. And, as she had been everywhere in fancy through her reading, she drew him out with questions that made it hard for him to believe she had not actually viewed with her own eyes. He seemed a wonderful person to her, he who had lived in the world's half dozen great capitals, had wandered all over the earth and had seen everything. Her comments astonished him, made him ashamed, and privately reverent of her "woman's intuition. No wonder it's considered better than brains."
"I wish I'd had some one like you along when I was chasing about," said he. "It was usually horribly dull, and I went on at it chiefly because I was always hoping something interesting would turn up. Now, I see it was turning up all the time. You have a light way of looking at things. A man sees only the serious side."
"Oh, it couldn't be dull—not anywhere on earth," insisted she.
"No—not with—that is, with somebody like you along." An awkward silence; then, "and I don't see how you ever learned so much without having experience."
"I don't really know things," confessed she. "I just seem to know. As a matter of fact, I'm frightfully innocent."
"That's the beautiful part of it," said he with enthusiasm.
"I hate it!" she cried.
"Oh, no," protested he.