She was talking as she walked, as if her words were set to music, her voice all little ripples, and bright upward and downward swoops like swallows flying, her hands and arms and shoulders and eyebrows acting a delicate pantomime of illustration, the pale, pure olive of her face flushed slightly with her animation. Every time she flashed a quick look up at him to make sure he was not bored, Neale caught his breath. He felt as though he were drinking the strongest kind of wine, he had the half-scared, half-enchanted feeling of a man who knows he is going to get very drunk, and has little idea of what will happen when he does.
"Yes, and then, and then?" he prompted her, eagerly.
"Well, and then you get into a phaeton. Oh, I don't suppose you have ever seen a phaeton!"
"Yes, I have," he contradicted her. "I've driven my grandfather miles in one when I was a little boy."
"Oh, you know, then, about this sort of—you have perhaps lived in a place like Ashley?" She was as eager as though it had been a question of finding that they were of the same family.
"I spent all my summers in West Adams, not so very far from Vermont."
"Ah then, you can understand what I tell you!" she said with satisfaction. "And in the phaeton you jog through the village, past the church, under the elms, with the white houses each under its thick green trees, and such green, green grass everywhere—not like Italy, all brown and parched; and then down the road till the turn-off for Crittenden's. For, you see, I also go to Crittenden's. My Cousin Hetty's home is one of the three or four houses that stand around your great-uncle's house and mill. And so up the road to Crittenden's between the mountains closer and higher, up into the quiet valley." Her voice deepened on the last words, and so did her eyes. She was silent a moment, looking out unseeingly on the tropical palms and bright, huge flowers of the Pincian Gardens through which they were now walking.
"Eh bien, since it's you who are going home, you drive on a little farther than my Cousin Hetty's house, until up before you slopes a lovely meadow, smooth, bright, shining green, like the enamel green field in the Limbo where Dante puts Electra and Hector and Cæsar. At the top of the slope, a long line of splendid, splendid elms, like this, you know ..." with her two hands and a free, upward gesture of her arms, she showed the airy opening-out of the wineglass elms, "and back of them a long old house, ever so long, because everything is fastened along together, house, porch, woodshed, hay-barn, carriage-shed, horse-barn." She laughed at the recollection, turning to him. "You've seen those long New England farm-homes? I remember a city man said once that you could see the head of the lady of the house leaning from one window and the head of a cow from another. He thought that the most crushing thing that could be said, but I think those homes perfectly delightful, homely, with a cachet of their own, not copied from houses in other countries. And really, you know," she turned serious, thinking suddenly that perhaps he needed reassurance, "really, it's just as clean as any other way of living. You're just as far away from the animals as with any other barn, because you have so much woodshed and hay-barn and things between you."
To see her face with that quite new, housekeeping, matter-of-fact, practical look gave him the most absurd and illogical amusement. He laughed outright. "Oh, don't think for a moment that I would object," he cried gaily. "I'm not a bit fastidious. I wouldn't care how near the cows were—if they were nice cows!"
She thought for an instant he might be laughing at her, and peered keenly into his face, a more openly observing look than she had as yet given him. What she saw evidently reassured her, for she went on with a lighter tone, "Truly it has its own sort of architectural beauty. It doesn't have a bit of the packing-box, brought-in-and-dumped-down look that most dwelling-houses have, no matter how they're planned. It seems to have grown that way. The long, low old farm-house, weathered so beautifully, it looks like an outcrop of the very earth itself, like a ridge or rock or a fold in a field."