While he ate, Pegeen went out and came back with her hands full of maidenhair fern.
“You might send for some vases when you’re ordering the hammock,” she said happily, as she put the ferns in a glass of water and set them on the table. “She says it’s wicked to let a room starve for flowers and green things when you can’t walk a step outdoors without finding something that would put heart into the very lonesomest, saddest room. I always did like flowers, but I never realized about ferns and green things till she showed me, ’n’ now I like them most better ’n flowers. They’re so cool, ’n’ fresh, ’n’ kind of resting. There’s always flowers or ferns or pine branches or bayberry or something in her rooms. I guess that’s why, even when she isn’t in them, they all seem kind of as if she must have just gone through them, smiling in her eyes, the way she does. Is that egg all right?”
“Perfect. She must be rather a wonderful Smiling Lady. Where does she live?”
“Right down the other side of Pine Knob. You can go over or around, but it’s prettiest over. There’s a spring up on top with pine trees around it and a place where you can look way out ’n’ out ’n’ out. She goes up there sometimes to watch the sunset. My, but she does love things.”
“And people?” questioned Archibald, idly.
“Well, I should say! She’s the lovingest thing. Sometimes I think the Loving Lady’d be a better name than the Smiling Lady, but I guess it’s all the same thing. Loving makes smiling, don’t it?”
“Not always,” said the man. His voice rang hard, and Pegeen shot a swift, surprised look at him.
“Well, it ought to,” she said soberly. “That’s what it’s really for—except when people you love get sick or die—or are bad. ’N’ if they’re bad that’s because they aren’t loving. She says if you love hard enough you just naturally make the world smiley—only you have to be sure it’s the real, right love, the kind of love God has. She’s the funniest thing. She talks about God right out, as if He were folks, ’n’ as if He and she had beautiful times together—like my measles. ’N’ she don’t go to church so awfully much either, ’n’ once I saw her sew on Sunday. That was when they were trying to get some clothes ready for the Johnston twins that came unexpected. I asked her how she was going to fix that with God—my mother was a Presbyterian—’n’ she laughed ’n’ said she didn’t have to fix it, ’cause sewing in His name was just as good as praying in His name, ’n’ loving was a bigger commandment ’n that one about not doing any work, ’n’ those twins surely would need loving, with their mother having no back bone ’n’ their father having delirious tremors.
“It’s nice out of doors now, ’n’ as soon as I wash dishes I’m going to begin cleaning.”
“I’m off,” laughed Archibald.