“They’re such dears,” she said enthusiastically. “They wanted me to come up here when I didn’t have anybody, but I’d rather come sometimes for a little while and then go away where the folks aren’t so holy and clean all the time. I love them to death and it’s terribly noble to go off and not get married and wear scoop bonnets and keep your floors as white as chalk, but I guess I’m not noble inside—’n’ anyway, if all the women went off and were holy and clean who’d see to the dirty and unholy folks?”
“Peggy,” said Archibald, earnestly, urgently, “if you should ever feel an attack of cleanly holiness coming on—the noble kind—fight it off. Take something for it. We unholy dirty sinners need you.”
“Don’t worry.” Pegeen’s tone was reassuring. “I’m not going to wear a scoop bonnet—not while there are hats with pink roses on them—but the Shakers are darlings all the same. Miss Moran just loves them.”
“She’s a very loving person.” There was an edge of criticism in his voice.
Pegeen thought it over.
“Yes, she is,” she admitted finally. “She loves most anybody—but then there are a few she loves especially and that’s quite different. It’s like being loved by a foreign missionary and being loved by your mother, you know. I’d lots rather be loved because I was nice than because I was a human soul, wouldn’t you?”
“I would,” assented Archibald with fervor.
When Susy, the Neal horse, had been intrusted to the tender care of a livery stable hostler in Pittsfield and the two whom she had brought from over the hills turned their faces toward Ranson and Kirby’s Dry Goods Emporium, Pegeen’s feet absolutely refused to conduct themselves sedately. Skip they would, in spite of all of her ideas of seemly behavior. Four sedate steps and then a skip was the final compromise, and in order to achieve that Peg had to anchor to something substantial.
She slipped a small brown hand into her companion’s large one and looked up at him with dancing eyes.
“If I don’t hold on to something, I’ll go up like a balloon,” she confided. “I don’t feel as if I weighed anything—especially my feet ’n’ my heart.”