It had not occurred to me to think where she had come from or how she happened to be there, or of anything in the years since I was last with her. The reminder that she had a school came as a shock—she was so utterly unlike my notion of the head of a school. I think she saw or felt what was in my mind, for she went on, to me: "I've had it six years now—the next will be the seventh."
"Do you like it?" I asked.
"Don't I look like a happy woman?"
"You do," said I, after our eyes had met. "You are."
"There were sixty girls last year—sixty-three," she went on. "Next year there will be more—about a hundred. It's like a garden, and I'm the gardener, busy from morning till night, with no time to think of anything but my plants and flowers."
She had conjured a picture that made my heart ache. I suddenly felt old and sad and lonely—a forlorn failure. "I too am a gardener," said I. "But it's a sorry lot of weeds and thistles that keeps me occupied. And in the midst of the garden is a plum tree—that bears Dead Sea fruit."
She was silent.
"You don't care for politics?" said I.
"No," she replied, and lifted and lowered her eyes in a slow glance that made me wish I had not asked. "It is, I think, gardening with weeds and thistles, as you say." Then, after a pause: "Do you like it?"
"Don't ask me," I said with a bitterness that made us both silent thereafter.