Bits of poetry were always coming to the surface with Anthy. I remember once, that very fall, as we were walking down the long lane homeward one Sunday afternoon from my farm, how Anthy, who had been silent for some time, suddenly made the whole world of that October day newly beautiful:
"The sweet, calm sunshine of October now
Warms the low spot; upon its grassy mould
The purple oak-leaf falls; the birchen bough
Drops its bright spoil like arrow heads of gold."
I remember looking at her rapt face as she repeated the words, and seeing the sunlight catch in her hair.
In some ways the Anthy, the real Anthy, of those days was only half awake. It is your unimaginative girl who sees in every dusty swain the possible hero of her heart; but she whose eyes are dazzled by the shining armour of a knight-o'-dreams comes reluctantly awake. It is so with some of the finest women: they step lightly through the years, with untouched hearts. There was a great deal of her father in Anthy, a great deal of the old New Englander, treasuring the best jealousy inside.
I think sometimes that women are far better natural executives and organizers than men. To keep a great household running smoothly, provisioned, cleaned, made sweet and cheerful always, and to do it incidentally as it were, with a hundred other activities filling her thoughts, is an accomplishment not sufficiently appreciated in this world. Anthy, like the true women of her race, had this capacity highly developed. She had a real genius for orderliness, which is the sanity, if not the religion, of everyday life.
"I will say this for Anthy Doane," old Mrs. Parker was accustomed to remark, "she is turrible particular."
How often have we been astonished to see gentlewomen (I like the good old word) torn from the harbour of sheltered lives and serenely navigating their ships on the stormiest seas, but without real cause for our astonishment, for they have merely applied in a wider field that genius for command and organization which they have long cultivated in their households. We may yet come to look upon many of the functions of government as only a larger kind of housekeeping, and find that we cannot afford to dispense longer with the executive genius of women in all those activities which deal with the comforts of human kind. (It's true, Harriet.)
Mrs. Parker, as I have said, having something on her mind, was in condition of unstable equilibrium.
"When you was little, Anthy," she began finally, "I used to tell you to put on your rubbers when you went out in the rain, and to take your umbrella to school, and not forget your 'rithmetic. Didn't I, Anthy?"
"Why, yes, Margaret." Anthy was much mystified.