We had reached the yard. Nathaniel was standing with his head stretched out above the closed half of his stable door. I noticed points of resemblance between him and Veronica herself: there was about him a like suggestion of resignation, of suffering virtue misunderstood; his eye had the same wistful, yearning expression with which Veronica will stand before the window gazing out upon the purple sunset, while people are calling to her from distant parts of the house to come and put her things away. Miss Janie, bending over him, asked him to kiss her. He complied, but with a gentle, reproachful look that seemed to say, “Why call me back again to earth?”
It made me mad with him. I was wrong in thinking Miss Janie not a pretty girl. Hers is that type of beauty that escapes attention by its own perfection. It is the eccentric, the discordant, that arrests the roving eye. To harmony one has to attune oneself.
“I believe,” said Miss Janie, as she drew away, wiping her cheek, “one could teach that donkey anything.”
Apparently she regarded willingness to kiss her as indication of exceptional amiability.
“Except to work,” commented her father. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “If you take that donkey off my hands and promise not to send it back again, why, you can have it.”
“For nothing?” demanded Janie woefully.
“For nothing,” insisted her father. “And if I have any argument, I’ll throw in the cart.”
Miss Janie sighed and shrugged her shoulders. It was arranged that Hopkins should deliver Nathaniel into my keeping some time the next day. Hopkins, it appeared, was the only person on the farm who could make the donkey go.
“I don’t know what it is,” said St. Leonard, “but he has a way with him.”
“And now,” I said, “there remains but Dick.”