“Aren’t they awful—that kind? But there are more of them in town than in the country. There really are—more in proportion to numbers, I mean. I don’t mean for a minute that I’ve got at everybody up here in the Valley but, accidentally or by mainforce, I’ve broken through some such hard shells and with such surprising results that I’m beginning to have a comfortable conviction about what’s inside of the very toughest human crust, if one could only get through to it. Now there’s Ezra Watts. He lives just a little way from here up the back road—much too near for the welfare of my chickens and fruit and vegetables. I’ve an idea he even milks my cows. He’s one of my failures and nobody in the Valley doubts that he’s bad all the way through. I have awful misgivings myself sometimes, but in my optimistic moments I still contend that there’s a decent scrap of soul hidden away somewhere in Ezra—hidden so thoroughly that even he doesn’t suspect it’s there.”
“I feel strangely drawn to Ezra,” Archibald murmured gravely.
The Smiling Lady flashed back a challenge.
“Why don’t you take him on?” she asked. “I’ve fumbled the thing. Maybe what he needs is man talk. It’s a long chance, but there’s really something very sporty about soul hunting.”
There was a mirthful ring even to her sentiment. She talked of souls as she might have talked of kittens or puppies or marigolds. From that angle, talk of souls did not seem the indelicate or embarrassing thing it is taken for by the average person not professionally concerned with soul culture or soul saving.
“I’m willing to warn you, though,” she conceded generously, “that Ezra needs disinfecting as much as he needs moral suasion. Nobody will ever burrow through to his soul until he’s had a bath.”
VI
It was late in the afternoon when Archibald turned up at the shack, and Pegeen, arrayed in one of the cheapest of the new frocks and very dressy as to hair ribbons and shoes, came down the path to meet him.
“It was a shame for them to scare you off so you didn’t even come home to dinner,” she said indignantly, “but you needn’t have been afraid. I shooed them all away at half-past eleven; they had to go home and get their own dinners anyway.”
“I wasn’t afraid of my neighbors. I was gardening for one of them.”