"It's Beulah Pierce's wife in that flower garden of hers," the artist explained. "It seems kind of sad when she goes out there alone sometimes. You know how tired she generally is, and how homesick she's been for twenty years or so—'all gaunted up,' as Ben says, like every ranchman's wife—they have to work so hard. And in the house she's apt to be peevish and scold Beulah and the boys like she despised them. But when she goes out into that garden——"
"Tell me," said his listener, after waiting discreetly a moment.
"Well, she's mighty different. She stands around mooning at the hollyhocks and petunias and geraniums and things, the flowers that grew in her garden back East, and I reckon she kind of forgets and thinks she's a girl back home again. Her face gets all gentled up. I've watched her when she didn't notice me—she's looking so far off—and when she goes into the house again her voice is queer, and she forgets to rampage till Shane Riley lets the stew burn, or Beulah tracks mud into the front room, or something. I tried to show her there, looking soft, just that way." He sounded a little apologetic as he finished.
"It's delightful," she insisted, "and they're all good—I can't tell you how good. You must do more of them, and"—she paused and shot him a careful glance to determine how wary it behooved her to be—"and I believe you should let color alone for awhile, until you've had a teacher show you some things. You must learn the trick."
"Oh, I'd try to learn fast enough, if I had the chance." His eyes lighted with a kind of furtive wistfulness, as if he would not have her wholly fathom his longing.
"Of course you could learn. I believe you can do something—something fine."
She rose from the couch and glanced over his books, with an air of wishing to touch other matters before they dwelt long on this. She noticed with some surprise a set of Meredith.
"Do you read these?" she asked, taking down one of the volumes.
There was an instant return of his former shyness, a hint of the child and the invaded playhouse. But she knew what to do. Without further remark she calmly lost herself in "Diana."
"Those books were my father's," he said at last, with the air of addressing an explanation to some third person. She ignored this, not even glancing at him. "But I've read them," he added, still as if to another person.