But after a while the windless freshness of the early morning began to have its effect on his preoccupied thoughts, and he felt a sort of cool spaciousness in the little hot chambers of his mind, as if all the doors had been thrown open.
Every one knows how. The hot throbbing of a thousand anxious thoughts, the gradual subsidence, the sense of freshness and peace—but only one person has been able to put it into words, and that one is Thomas à Kempis: he no doubt felt it one early morning, after having striven all night long for cool light amid a hot darkness full of fears.
“Quietness of heart and pleasant joy.”
That’s it.
But Andy’s only conscious thought was that he felt fresher now, and that he would take a few vegetables up the lane to Mrs. Simpson. She had nothing more than a little flower-garden before her cottage, and would no doubt be glad of them.
So he ate his breakfast with an appetite which almost justified his early reputation in Gaythorpe, and went off with a basket of green things, all wet with dew, to his neighbour’s door.
“You’re very kind,” said Mrs. Simpson. “I never touch greens myself, but the children will like them. It takes a green stomach to tackle greens, I always think.”
She glanced placidly from Andy to the two children by the door, so evidently including him among the green things of the earth that he felt bound to assert himself.
“It is extremely bad for the health to take no vegetables,” he remarked, with a flavour in his voice compounded of the senior curate and the lady lay helper.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Simpson, moving her calm gaze from the distant fields, where it had strayed, “well, my great-grandmother lived to be ninety-six, and she never touched greens.”