“Aren’t you rather hard to suit to-day, mister? Shall I be a hen, then, scratching for her chicks? That’s mild.”
“No, no, no. Yes. No. I don’t know about the hen. Let me have a sample.”
He watched her, critically and provisionally, while with 305comfortable, motherly, half-suppressed chest-sounds, and a round eye cocked for finds among the dirt, remarkably altogether the appearance of a pensive white hen, she made believe to scratch up the earth with her feet. A rather sympathetic performance, he allowed, her imitation of the hen, calling up before one the vision of a farmyard, a brood of downy yellow chicks, a duckpond, sunshine, green things.
He let her do it as long as she would, or rather until to vary the thing she increased the comic beyond the line he fixed. When midday found him grudgingly laughing at her cackling, it seemed improbable certainly that midnight had seen him sleeping in her arms. But underlying their laughter was a consciousness in each that day of a thing uniting them which had not been there before.
Sitting bolstered up in bed to eat his first real meal, he looked, with his long hair parted in the middle and brushed down over his hollow temples, like one of those old masters in the Ewe-fitsy, Aurora told him. A St. John the Baptist, she specified.
She chipped the top off his egg and cut finger sizes of bread for him, so that he might have it in the foreign way he preferred.
While he languidly ate, yet with pleasure, the door softly swung inward, revealing faces of women,–Estelle, Clotilde, Livvy, Giovanna,–all equally kind, all craning for the delight of a peep at him eating his soft-boiled egg.
Because he was still weak, tears came into his eyes, and because he could not permit them to be seen, he waved and haggardly smiled toward the smiling and nodding faces without inviting them nearer.
306Women! women!... What a great deal of room they had occupied in his life! How much he owed them for affection,–mother, sister, servant-girl, friends....