Our families had always been friends, so I happened to know that years and years ago, when Mr. Walker was a clerk in an insurance office—with a horse and buggy for business through the week and joy unconfined on Sunday—they had been in the habit of haunting this spot, he and his slim young wife—bringing a basket full of supper and thrusting the baby's milk bottle down into the ice-cream freezer. Then, there were more years, of longing and saving; they bought the hill, patiently enduring a period of blue-prints and architectural advice before the house was built. By this time Mrs. Walker's slimness was gone, and Mr. Walker had found out the vanity of hair tonics—but the house was theirs at last. It was big and very beautiful—roomy, rather than mushroomy—and thoughtful, rambling, old-timey, spreading out a great deal of portico to the kiss of the sun. Brown-hooded monks and clanking beads ought, by rights, to have gone with that portico.
Then, the June sunshine was doing such wonders with the oaks, great and small, along the hillsides!
It touched up, with a tinge of glory, even the shining motor-cars in the driveway. There were dozens of them—limousines, touring cars, lady-like coupés—with their lazy, half-asleep attendants, and the regularity of their unbroken files, their dignity, their quietness, and the glitter of the sun against their metal gave them something of a martial aspect. The silver sheen of the lamps and levers was brought out in a manner to suggest a line of marching men, silent, but very potent—and enjoying more than a little what they offered to view, the dazzle of helmet, sword and coat-of-mail.
The beauty of it all—the softened glory of the shade in which I sat making me feel that I was a spectator at a tournament—cast a spell over me, for I never find it very hard to fall spellbound. Isn't it funny that when you're possessed of an intelligence which has fits of St. Vitus' dance they call it Imagination?—That's the kind mine is—jerky and unreliable. It is the kind of imagination which can take a dried-up acorn and draw forth a medieval forest; or gaze upon a rusty old spur and live over again the time when knights were bold.
But to get back to "those present."
First of all, I noted Oldburgh's best-known remittance man. I noted him mentally, mind you, not paragraphically, for they never made me do the real drudgery of the society page. He was sitting beside his mama, swinging her gauze fan annoyingly against her lorgnette chain. His divorce the year before had come near uniting Church and State, since it's a fact that nothing so cements conflicting bodies like the uprising of a new common foe; and he had sinned against both impartially. After him came two or three financial graybeards; three or four yearling bridegrooms, not broken yet to taking the bit between their teeth and staying rebelliously at the office; a habitual "welcomer to our city"—Major Harvey Coleman, a high officer in the Sons of the American Revolution, and the pièce de résistence of this occasion—then—then—!
Well, certainly the impassive being next him was the most unsocial-looking man I had ever had my eyes droop beneath the gaze of!
He was sitting in the place of honor—in the last chair of the first row—but despite this, he so clearly did not belong at that party, and he so clearly wished himself away that I—well, I instantly began searching through the crowds to find a woman with handcuffs! I felt sure that, whoever she might be—she hadn't got him there any other way!
And yet—and yet—(my thoughts were coming in little dashing jerks like that) he was rather too big for any one woman to have handled him!
I decided this after another look and another droop of my own eyes, for he was still looking—and that was what I decided about him first—that he was very big! Then misbehaving brown hair came next into my consciousness. It came to top off a picture which for a moment caused me to wonder whether he was really a flesh-and-blood man at Mrs. Walker's reception, or the spirit of some woodsman—come again, after many years, to haunt the grove of the Seven Oaks.