"I said I was going upstairs to change my dress. The same old room, I suppose?"
"Yes, I fixed the same room for you."
While she cleared off the table, Mrs. Oakley gazed after her daughter with a perplexed and anxious expression. Dorinda in her flowing veil, with her air of worldly knowledge and disillusioned experience, had awed and impressed her. Was it possible that she had created this superior intelligence, that she had actually brought this paragon of efficiency into the world? "Well, I hope it will turn out the way you want it," she remarked presently to her daughter's retreating back, "but, in my time, I've watched many a big bloom that brought forth mighty small fruit."
At sunset, when Nathan Pedlar came for his daily visit, Dorinda walked over a part of the farm with him. He was wearing his Sunday suit of clothes, and though this emphasized his grotesqueness, it increased also the air of having been well scrubbed and brushed which had distinguished him from the other farmers at the station. Since his wife's death he had prospered, as widowers were so frequently known to do, Dorinda reflected; and now that he was able to employ an assistant, he was not closely confined to the store. Though his neighing laugh still irritated the girl, she found herself regarding his deficiencies more leniently. After all, he was not to blame for the way he looked; he was not even to blame, she conceded less readily, for the things that he thought funny. Since that fantastic humour had taken root in her mind, she had been continually puzzled by the variety of obvious facts which people, and especially men, found amusing. She could not, to save her life, laugh at the spectacles they enjoyed, nor did the freakish destiny that provoked her to merriment appear to divert them at all. From the cool and detached point of view she had attained, life appeared to her to be essentially comic; but comic acts, whether presented in the theatre or in the waggish hilarity of Pedlar's Mill, seemed to her merely depressing. She was not amused by the classic jokes of the period, which were perpetually embodied in a married man who was too fat or an unmarried woman who was too thin. Flesh or the lack of it, hats or the pursuit of them, crockery or the breaking of it; none of these common impediments to happiness possessed, for her, the genuine qualities of mirth. But reprehensible though she knew it to be, she could not recall the misguided earnestness of her girlhood without the pricking of ridicule; and the image of mankind strutting with pompous solemnity into the inevitable abyss impressed her as the very spirit of comedy. Tragic but comic, too, as most tragedy was. Would it ever pass, she wondered, this capricious and lonely laughter?
"I can't help it," she thought, walking by Nathan's side, and listening soberly to his story of a coloured woman who had tried to make him pay an additional price for a chicken with three legs. "I can't help it if they, not the things they laugh at, seem funny to me."
It was a misty, lilac-scented afternoon in April. The sun shone softly when it began to go down, as if it were caught in a silver scarf, and the grass in the pear orchard was white with drifting blossoms. Those old trees always bloomed late, she remembered, and the ground was still snowy with fallen petals when the lilac bushes by the west wing were breaking into flower.
As she followed the beaten track by the orchard, her gaze swept the ploughed fields, where the upturned earth was changing from chocolate to purple as the light faded. Around her the farm spread out like an open fan, ploughed ground melting into waste land, fields sinking into neglected pasture, pasture rising gradually into the dark belt of the pines. She knew that the place was more to her than soil to be cultivated; that it was the birthplace and burial ground of hopes, desires, and disappointments. The old feeling that the land thought and felt, that it possessed a secret personal life of its own, brushed her mood as it sped lightly by.
"All this and just waste, waste, waste," she said slowly.
Nathan glanced up at the big pine on the hill. "Ever think of cutting that tree down for timber?" he inquired.
She shook her head. "It's the only thing Pa likes to watch now. He loves it."