Before Jean could find an answer, they had reached Signa Patrona’s studio. It seemed filled with groups of people. Jean had a confused sense of many introductions, and Signa herself, a tall, slender girl in black with a rose made of gold tissue fastened in her dusky, low coiled hair. She rarely spoke, but smiled delightfully. The girls found Mrs. Crane and her sister in a corner.
“Aunt Win,” said Bab. “Here’s your country girl. Isn’t she blooming? Talk to her while I get some tea.”
“My dear,” Mrs. Everden surveyed her in a benevolent, critical sort of fashion, “you’re improved. The last time I saw you, was out at Shady Cove. You and your sisters were in some play I think, given by the Junior Auxiliary of the Church. You live in the country now, Barbara tells me. I have friends in the Berkshires.”
“Oh, but we’re way over near the Rhode Island border,” Jean said quickly. It seemed as if logically, all people who moved from Long Island must go to the Berkshires. “It’s real country up there, Gilead Centre. We’re near the old Post Road to Boston, from Hartford, but nobody hardly ever travels over it any more.”
“We might motor over in the spring, Barbara would enjoy it. Are the roads good in the spring, my dear?”
Visions of Gilead roads along in March and April flitted through Jean’s mind. They turned into quagmires of yellow mud, and where the frost did take a notion to steal away, the road usually caved in gracefully after the first spring rains. Along the end of April after everybody had complained, Tucker Hicks, the road committeeman, would bestir himself leisurely and patch up the worst places. No power in Gilead had ever been able to rouse Tucker to action before the worst was over.
“Mother’d dearly love to have you come,” she said. “The only thing we miss up there is the friendship of the Cove neighbors. If you wouldn’t mind the roads, I know you’d enjoy it, but they are awful in the spring. But nobody seems to mind a bit. One day down at the station in Nantic I heard two old farmers talking, and one said the mud up his way was clear up to the wheel hubs. ‘Sho,’ said the other. ‘Up in Gilead, the wheels go all the way down in some places.’ Just as if they were proud of it.”
Mrs. Everden shook her head slowly, and looked at her sister.
“I can’t even imagine Bess Robbins living in such a forsaken place.”
“Oh, but it isn’t forsaken,” protested Jean loyally. “And Mother really enjoys it because it’s made Father nearly well.”