[CHAPTER I]
IN LEUK
THE June sun shone on the green slope above the village of Leuk and the grass carpeting the heights far beyond with cool green filled the air with fragrance. In front of an isolated house on the road to the baths of Leuk two women engaged in earnest conversation.
"I tell you, Marianne," said the more talkative one, "if you could furnish a couple of rooms as I did, you would find it very profitable. You would soon get boarders, for many of the people coming to the baths do not wish to live there, or they should not, like the three I have. Of course you live rather far down and most people prefer the higher localities. If only you lived over there where those people do! They have the best location on the slope, and own the best meadow land too. But I do not like them," glancing at the house with an unfriendly look. "They are eaten up with pride. The man is not so bad, but you should see the woman!"
"How do they show their pride?" asked Marianne.
"Better ask how they do not show it," quickly replied Magdalen. "They show it in everything—the way they walk, the way they stand, and they dress as though every day were Sunday. The boy's black hair is always curled as though he were going to a church festival, and the little girl sticks her nose up in the air as much as to say, 'Here I come!'"
"The little girl can't help it if her nose turns up, and the boy isn't really to blame for his curly hair," Marianne replied. "Doesn't the woman speak pleasantly when you meet her?"
"Oh, yes, she does that, and I wouldn't advise her to carry her pride that far," said Magdalen in a threatening tone. "But if you think she stops a moment to speak a few words, as our other neighbors do, you are mistaken."
Marianne looked at the house and said in quick surprise, "What has happened? As long as I can remember that house looked old and gray and all the windows were grimy with dust. Now it looks like a different house, so snow white and the windows shine in the sun."
"It is the same house, and the change shows how proud they are," answered Magdalen warmly. "Farmer Lesa lived there more than fifty years with his old housekeeper, and in all those years never drove so much as a nail in the house. What was good enough for father and grandfather before him was good enough for him. When his heir came from over the Gemmi, there started such a tearing down and rebuilding and such a cleaning up one might suppose a count was moving in. Of course the wife was the cause of it all."