“Well, as I said, he graduated from the high school a year ago last spring. He stood second in his class. The boy who was ahead of him is the son of a circuit judge. David was nineteen. In five years he had gone from the very beginning to the end of the high school course. Now he’s in college, and I don’t know what he’ll do after he graduates, but I’m sure it will be something fine. Don’t you think that’s better than being afraid of being laughed at, and settling down to be an ignorant laborer all his life?”
“Oh, I guess it’s all right, if he felt like it.” Jerry spoke with an elaborate carelessness. “Well, I must be going.” There was a trace of resentment in his tone, more than a trace in his heart. Jerry’s high opinion of Peggy had originally sprung from her appreciation of his good qualities. It was a rather painful surprise to find that she recognized his lacks. In fact, Jerry was inclined to think that she exaggerated them.
“I ain’t no coward, just because I don’t want to be cooped up in school with a lot of kids,” he told himself angrily, as he walked away. Yet his morning’s talk with Peggy had clouded his spirits. Long before Jerry had come to accept with cheerful philosophy the disapproval of his neighbors. They understood crops and dairying. He understood birds and trees, and, in his own opinion, he was at no disadvantage in the comparison, but rather the opposite. He regarded their knowledge as humdrum, and it did not disturb him that they looked on his acquisitions as worthless.
But with Peggy it was different. The naturalist who had impoverished himself in his eagerness to study birds, she had held up to his admiration as a great man. Jerry was sure that his neighbors would not so estimate him. They would call him “shiftless,” the adjective that had been applied times without number to Jerry himself. Peggy approved such research, and yet she found fault with him. She thought he needed the help of the schools, of books, of friends. Undoubtedly she had implied that he was a coward. Jerry winced at the recollection.
“I don’t have to go to school just to please her,” Jerry boasted, but his declaration of independence failed to assuage that curious uneasiness that was almost pain. He had disappointed a friend. His effort to forget that fact in manufacturing resentment against Peggy proved quite unsuccessful.
As for Peggy, she watched the vanishing figure rather ruefully, and was inclined to think her morning’s effort wasted, if not worse. Like most amateur gardeners, Peggy was fond of immediate results. She liked to see shoots starting when the seed had hardly touched the soil, leaf and blossom following with miraculous swiftness. Nature’s slow processes were trying to the patience. Peggy watched Jerry out of sight, and then, her face unusually thoughtful, made her way to the front porch which presented an unusually populous appearance that morning. The day was rather warm, and a forenoon of idleness had appealed to the household as preferable to a more strenuous form of entertainment.
“Aren’t they any better?” asked Elaine, noticing the gravity of her friend’s face, but misinterpreting it.
“Who? Oh, the chickens.” Peggy roused herself. “I can’t say that I see any improvement. And if there’s anything that looks more sickly than a sick chicken, I don’t know its name.”
“Well, anyway, Freckles is perfectly healthy,” Ruth said encouragingly. “And it’s all the more to your credit because you brought him up yourself.” Some time before, the speckled chicken had asserted his individuality to such an extent that a name had seemed a necessity, and after considerable canvassing of the matter, “Freckles” had received a majority vote. Freckles had long ceased to impress the observer as a pathetic object. He was an energetic, pin-feathery creature, noted equally for his appetite and his pugnacity. Dorothy who had not hesitated to bestride Farmer Cole’s boar, and was absolutely fearless as far as Hobo was concerned, retreated panic-stricken before Freckles’ advances. For owing to reasons not apparent, Freckles found an irresistible temptation in Dorothy’s slim, black-stockinged legs.
Peggy shooed away the persistent Freckles, who had given up his designs upon the gravel walk at her approach, and was pecking frantically at her shoe-buttons, evidently under the impression that they were good to eat. “Oh, he’s healthy enough,” she replied. “It begins to look as if he’d be all I’d have to show for my poultry raising experiment, and I had it all planned out how I’d spend the money for the whole eighteen chickens.” Peggy joined in the laugh against herself before she added cheerily: “Well, even if air-castles tumble down, it’s fun to build them.”