Margaret Hazeltine sat on her porch with the spring wind blowing over her elusive wafts of fragrance—plum-blossom, apple-blossom, young grass, budding wood scents, pure, growing earth-smells.
"It is like breathing poetry," Margaret thought.
She was sewing, but now and then her hands fell in her lap while she lifted her head, catching in some wandering sweetness with a sharp breath, like a sigh.
It was four o'clock in the afternoon. Sunshine mellowed the new greenness of short, tender grass on the lawns. It shone upon all the bare, budded branches up and down the street, seeking, caressing, stimulating. It lay kindly, genially, on the mid-road dust.
Margaret's father was pottering about the garden. He was a very old man, with stooping shoulders, but tall and slender like his daughter. He came up to the porch and stood leaning on his hoe. The wind fluttered his shabby garden-coat and thin, white beard. He rested his wrinkled old hands on the top of his hoe handle, and cast up his faded, sunken eyes to the intense young blue of the sky with its fleecy clouds floating.
Mr. Hazeltine addressed his daughter in the strain of conversational piety habitual with him, and in a voice which age and earnestness made tremulous:
"Seems like every spring I get more certain of my eternal home up yonder!"
Margaret smiled acquiescently. Long since she had silently drifted outside the zone of her father's simple, rigid creed; but to-day its bald egoism did not repel her. It seemed at one with the sweet will to live all about them.
Mr. Hazeltine went back to the garden. A girl appeared on the porch of the house opposite. The Hazeltine house was small and old and not lately painted. The house opposite was large, fresh, trim, and commodious in every visible detail. White cement walks enclosed and divided its neatly kept lawns and parking. Its fruit-trees breathed out of the unfolding whiteness of their bosoms the sweetest of those perfumes that drifted across to Margaret. The girl on the porch pushed the wicker chairs about for a moment, then, disdaining them all, sat down on the cement steps and rested her chin in her palm.