“Wasn’t May Wilmore a dear in her flowered sash?”
“Like a sweet pea,” Theodosia would say.
“Like a whole bouquet of little flowers.”
“And Ruth was sweet in her green dress, dark bands across her hair.”
Or Ruth Robinson would run in during the morning to ask Theodosia to go for a drive far into the country. Once they went to gather dogwood blossoms from a tree she knew of, far down the Quincy pike. They set out early in the afternoon and let the old horse take his own way of keeping clear of the few passing cars. In the end they went as far as the farm where Theodosia’s aunt lived. They talked with the old aunt in the musty parlor, sitting stiffly on the curve-backed chairs, and were scratched under the knees by the broken horse-hair cloth. Miss Doe brought a plate of stale little cakes for a treat. Somewhere back among the barns the useless old jack stallion would bray, and the great hounds, fat and indolent, would loll in the front doorway or wander through the rooms, sniffing at Theodosia’s dress again and again, or at Ruth’s slipper, dull-minded and slow, stretching stiffly by the parlor wall and returning to lie by the door and sleep. Tom Singleton was buried on the hilltop now. Miss Doe had had some need of him and when he was dead she mourned her loss with a perpetual attention to his memory. She kept all the hounds he had used for his hunting although they grew old and some of them became half insane. She let them multiply without discrimination and gave them access to the rooms of the house where, Theodosia suspected, they chose their own kennels and made free of the house from the garret to the pantries.
Now Miss Doe was grateful to the girls for their call, for the long drive they had taken, and she passed the cakes about with a thin gayety. She asked after the health of Horace and of Anthony, but she would not ask the girls to stay for the night. She withheld any gossip of the farm, of new calves or colts or chickens, feigning that these matters were too common for the interest of the parlor, reticent to answer questions. “She doesn’t want to share even the news of a new-dropped colt with me,” Theodosia would think, biting the little cake.
“I think I’d like to look around the place a little, Aunt Doe,” she said, when the call was near an end. “Could I look about a little? Could I show Ruth around, show her the vine? And the hilltop, maybe?”
“There’s little to entertain town girls with on the place. You can go and see, though, whatever you think there is to see.” She would laugh in a thin way, remaining indoors, peeping from behind the window curtains while they walked back into the farm.
The place was out of repair, and the dogs trampled it under. They were omnipresent, untrained, ill-mannered brutes. They lay sprawling in the doorway or they cluttered the path to the barns. They came up from the cellar sniffing with hostile interest, unused to visitors. The vine had died from the west wall and hung there withered and untended. Tom Singleton was greatly missed from the place.
“I hope you found everything to suit you,” Miss Doe said when they came back to the house door to say good-bye. “I hope you liked.”