“Well!” I exclaimed.
“Don't smile—not yet.”
As I looked at her I felt not at all like smiling.
“I know,” she was saying, “it does have a humorous side. I can see that. Dick has seen it all along. Do you know, although Dick pretends to pooh-pooh everything intellectual, he has a really penetrating mind.”
I had a sudden vision of Dick in his old smoking jacket, standing in the midst of the immaculate cottage that was once a barn, holding his pipe with one finger crooked around the stem just in front of his nose in the way he had, and smiling across at me.
“Have you deserted the cottage entirely?”
“Oh, we may possibly go back in the spring———” She paused and looked into the fire, her fine, strong face a little sad in composure, full of thought.
“I am trying to be honest with myself David. Honest above everything else. That's fundamental. It seems to me I have wanted most of all to learn how to live my life more freely and finely.... I thought I was getting myself free of things when, as a matter of fact, I was devoting more time to them than ever before-and, besides that, making life more or less uncomfortable for Dick and the children. So I've taken my courage squarely in my hands and come back here into this blessed old home, this blessed, ugly, stuffy old home—I've learned that lesson.”
At this, she glanced up at me with that rare smile which sometimes shines out of her very nature: the smile that is herself.
“I found,” she said, “that when I had finished the work of becoming simple—there was nothing else left to do.”