It needed only that difficulty of getting possession to make me sure that this was the very house for which I had been waiting all my life. I knew, too, that the romance of the situation would be the deciding point in any opposition that I might well expect to meet from my husband, who was still in New York. Jasper was a fiction-writer, at present aspiring to be a playwright, and it was true that he needed for his work an atmosphere that he could people with the phantoms of his own mind, rather than the disturbing congestion of the apartment where we now lived. In setting out to follow Ruth’s advice and buy a house on Cape Cod, I felt that I was doing my best not only for myself and the sort of family life that I felt would naturally follow, but for my husband and his exacting career. I realized that it would be for both of us a solution of the philosophy of living. Jasper had reached that stage in the beginning of success when it seemed to his friends that he was working too hard and playing too hard, squandering his talents upon Carthaginian gods who would only burn him up in the end.
I had been following Ruth in silence, for the way through the wood was hard, but now we came into the outskirts of the fishing-village and, crossing the single railroad track that ran the length of the cape, struck the easy tread of the boardwalks. There were only two streets in Star Harbor, front and back, and, sending the children on to Ruth’s house by the back way, their pockets oozing with blueberries, we emerged to the front street and faced the bay, just as the Pond-Lily Man was passing.
He was returning from his day’s work, peddling pond-lilies up and down the cape on his bicycle, a great basket of them dripping from his arm now, their luscious white heads closed, although not wilted; and he offered them all to Ruth hopefully, to get rid of them.
“Pond-lilies,” he repeated automatically, as he saw us coming into sight. “Pond-lilies. Five cents a bunch!”
He was a thin little man with a tired face, apologetic, but stubborn about his trade, selling his flowers with a mildness and a persistence that was deceptive.
Ruth bought them all, only asking if he would, as a favor, carry them up to her cottage.
“As a favor,” he replied; “this time!”
“Pond-lilies! Pond-lilies!” he called again, as he started off, seeming to forget that we had purchased the entire stock.
“Poor thing,” said Ruth; “that cry is a habit with him. He must do it in his sleep. He used to be a parson of some sort, but his ‘health failed him’ and that’s the way he supports his family. They say his children all get out in a flat-bottomed boat on Pink Pond, down the cape, and pick them for him every morning before it is light.”
“They work hard up here,” said I, feeling rather inadequate to the occasion, which was so tremendously local.