Incidentally he made a mental note to the effect that Edison should be pilloried by womankind. Even the rarest of beauties lost charm under an electric glare, while in candle-light hair and eyes and lips and throat took on alluring mysteries—little half lights of confession, swift, fleeting, golden, high lights of revelation. The Smiling Lady’s radiant serenity dissolved into witchery there in the candle light. A dimple the man had not noticed before quivered in her left cheek, disappeared, came back into view. Elusive reservations had crept into the candid eyes. A very pink parasolish Young Person indeed!
Archibald hastily revised certain impressions having to do with Olympian detachment Altogether human, this Lady of the Smiles. No Young Goddess, but half child, half woman, and wholly lovely. It was all wrong that she should be stranded here at the world’s end, among alien folk, that she should be alone save for an old servant, shut away in the heyday of her youth from a world where pink parasols flaunted bravely up and down, gay winding ways.
Then, oddly enough, a trail of faces drifted through his memory, women’s faces seen against rose-colored backgrounds on those same gay winding ways, and following them came a vision of the Smiling Lady, sitting among flowers and long grasses in a sunlit, woodland glade with young life tumbling round her. No, it wasn’t possible to pity her. After all, there were pink parasols—and pink parasols.
IV
Pegeen’s day dawned radiantly, a perfect June day of sun-warmed breezes and drifting, white clouds against an ardent, azure sky, and the small girl was as radiant as the day.
“I couldn’t sleep for thinking of it,” she said happily, as she brought in Archibald’s breakfast.
For a moment she was silent, watching as usual with an anxious little frown while he broke the shell of the two-minute eggs, but when the ordeal was past and she once more made sure that fire and water had not betrayed her, she went on talking. Breakfast was always a conversational interlude at the shack.
“I dreamed a dreadful dream about you getting over to Pittsfield and not having any money and I cried so it waked me up, and then I got to thinking maybe it was a warning or something, so I prayed like fury. Mr. Colby, the minister down in the village, says we oughtn’t to pray for what we want, that we ought to pray for grace to want what the Lord thinks best for us to have, but it seems to me that’s a silly way to pray. When we’ve got a thing we’ve just got to make the best of it and that’s all there is to it, but I believe in getting to work early and praying for something it’ll be easy to make the best of. I told God that if anything horrid was going to happen I wished to goodness He’d stave it off till after I had my hat, and I think He will.”
“Nothing horrid is going to happen.” Archibald spoke with the assurance of one who has inside information.
“We are going to have the time of our young lives, Peggy. Never mind the dishes this morning. You can do them to-morrow.”