The child’s eyes were like stars, her cheeks were pinker than her dainty frock. Happiness—unalloyed, effervescent, illimitable happiness enveloped her from the most aspiring tendril of the wild rose wreath to the toe-tips of the shining new shoes. And when she looked across the table at the Fairy Godfather in prosaic tweed, adoration elbowed rapture in the look.
“I’ve got my legs twisted around the table leg, so I can’t float up,” she told him, leaning forward and speaking in confidential tones, out of consideration for the waiter, “but I wouldn’t be a mite surprised if something would go bang, and I’d wake up at Mrs. Benderby’s in my old blue gingham and find out that I’d been dreaming you and the hat and everything.”
She behaved very prettily in spite of her excitement. Watching her, Archibald found himself thinking of what Mrs. Neal had said about the frail, proud, little mother whom love and life had broken. The hint of race and breeding in Pegeen’s face must have come from her—the dainty ways of the child too. There was no awkwardness about the small girl’s manner though this was her first introduction to a hotel menu, a waiter’s service, a crowd’s scrutiny. Archibald had wondered often at the purity of her speech, which for all its childish inconsequence held none of the vulgarisms of the untrained, and now he realized that her table manners, like her grammar, must have had early and thorough attention. Poor little mother, how she would love the child now! How she must have loved the father of the child when she tossed her own world aside for him!
“You’re looking sorry!” said the girl across the table from him. She was amazed—reproachful. How was it possible for any one to be sorry on such a day!
“I was being sorry for all the fairy god-fathers whose godchildren aren’t exactly like you, Peggy,” the man explained, and she forgave him.
The drive home was quieter than that of the morning. Pegeen was as happy as she had been, but between the happiness of anticipation and the happiness of content, the heart travels far. She was satisfied now to lean against the shabby, leather-covered back of the buggy-seat and watch the shadows lengthen across the meadows and steal silently up towards the sun-gilded hilltops.
Once in a while she looked up at Archibald to see if he was contented too. Their eyes met and then they went back to their thoughts and dreams. There were snatches of talk, flung out from Pegeen’s drifting thoughts. She wondered why pink was the happiest color and she wondered whether the black sheep in a flock was proud or ashamed, and she thought the father birds must teach the baby birds to fly because it would give mother birds nervous prostration to do it, and she guessed God didn’t give you any credit for loving all his works when you were very happy because it was easy as rolling off a log, and she was quite sure that people who lived in white houses were happier than people who lived in gray houses, and she was afraid Miss Moran would think they’d spent too much money.
“She’s coming up to see things just as soon as we get home. She promised she would. Maybe she’ll be there when we get there. We’re driving so slowly and I told her we’d surely be home before six.”
“Why bless my soul, Peg, are we fixed for visitors?” Archibald’s tone held consternation, but Pegeen treated his doubt with scorn.
“Everything’s as clean as can be, and fresh flowers and a fire laid, and I told her the key would be under the loose brick, if anything kept us and she got there first.”