"One does. It seems the least one can do."
"Too much work and not enough exercise," pronounced Archie, casting a semi-professional eye over him. "Nothing ages a man so quick as to let his muscles sag on him—but you brainy people always forget you've got muscles except in your heads. I'll have to make you hoe the garden and put on the gloves with me now and then, like I do Joan."
"No wonder she is able to hoist fat sons about as if they were feathers!" commented Nikolai.
It was a happy luncheon they had together, and a garrulous one. The Blair family talked all at once, including the youngest, who had three words at his command and liked to practice them. Ellen also joined freely in the conversation as she waited upon them. Nikolai was the only quiet one, seeming content to look and listen.
He had to hear all about the finding of the Farm, as Archie called his two acres and a cottage. When the reunited Blairs had been looking about for a place they could afford to live in—"And raise a family," added Archie happily—they had come across the little place, weed-grown and deserted, and rented it for almost nothing.
"The chickens and the garden alone practically pay the rent," boasted Archie, "and this summer I'm going to set up a hog. Real money in hogs, Mr. Nikolai! Of course the house is pretty old-timey and plain,"—he indicated the low ceilings and deep-set, many-paned windows—"but Joan likes old-timey things. She says this is a country cousin to that old place I used to live in on Poplar Street. Says a house without any ghosts in it is as uninteresting as a house without any books in it." (Archie was always fond of quoting the sayings of his Joan.)
"You do not miss people?" Nikolai asked her, recalling how easily the young American had made her place in what is perhaps the most finished society in the world.
"I have no chance to. We have neighbors enough—nice country women who exchange patterns and recipes and cuttings with me, and even a book now and then. If I want another sort, it is easy enough to run into town—or even on to New York, now that I've the excuse of publishers to be seen! And lately the town has begun to come out to me. Not at first. Emily and the others had a good deal to say about the folly of burying oneself in the country. You see this is not Country Club or golf-course country. But now I notice that they're glad enough to come whenever I ask them—or even when I don't!—Oh, the peace of it, Stefan! At night you can positively hear the silence."
"Amid the darkness that we feel is green,"
he said.