Nora Moran dimpled at him approvingly across the bowl of June roses that stood in the center of the table. Spicy pink and white, old-fashioned garden roses they were. It occurred to Archibald that they rimed with the face beyond them as no hot-house flowers could have rimed with it. For one foolish, inconsequent moment he tried to imagine himself buying orchids for this garden girl. He had bought many orchids. Women liked them because they were so expensive, but for the Smiling Lady—
He came back from the Fifth Avenue flower shops to the June roses and the girl beyond them.
“You’re coming on rapidly,” she was saying. “It isn’t every one who could discover, neighboring and gardening all in one short June. Some people never discover either of them—poor souls. That’s why the yellow journals have scandals enough and tragedies enough to keep them going. But if you’ve got it in you to garden—and to neighbor—Oh, I’ve great hopes of you. Peggy will make something of you yet.”
“And there aren’t any scandals and tragedies in the country?” he asked lightly.
A shadow crept into the girl’s smiling eyes.
“But there are—dreadful ones sometimes—and they seem even more dreadful up here than they do in town because each one stands out so stark and ugly against the beauty all round about it. I had frightfully heartachey times when I first began to find the sordid, ugly things growing along with the loveliness in this quiet country place—jealousies and feuds and slovenliness and vulgarity and cruelty and worse—but I worked my way through those heartaches—or at least I learned to understand and be tolerant The weeds grow with the flowers everywhere, I guess. And it’s so easy to think too much about your neighbors’ business when you haven’t anything else to entertain you, and to magnify little slights and offenses when you haven’t more important things to occupy your mind. And it’s hard to live up to standards when there’s no one to appreciate—and natural beauty doesn’t give you much joy, if you’ve always been doing hard, grinding work in the midst of it. Gracious! I only wonder that most of the country folk are such plumb dears as they are.”
“But they garden and neighbor,” prompted Archibald.
“They don’t.” She was too much in earnest to be polite. “You don’t think raising vegetables and knowing everybody for miles around are gardening and neighboring, do you? Not a bit of it. You’ve got to put your heart into the garden and the people if you’re going to do real gardening and neighboring. When you get around to that, you’ve learned how to be happy most of the time and contented all of the time. I used to think that nine tenths of the people I met were uninteresting, but I’ve found out that, all the time, there weren’t any uninteresting people. There were only people I hadn’t got at.”
Archibald shook his head doubtfully. “Short of using a pickax or an auger—” he demurred. He was thinking of some of the men and women he had known.
The girl laughed.