"Well, not at the rate I'm going now," she replied with a rueful smile toward her book and pencil lying inert on the grass; yet she made no effort to resume her work. Evidently the starch in Waterloo's rompers had driven away romance.
"But everything has its compensation," she continued after a moment. "If I never get my great trip around the world with a ten-days' stop-over in Japan I can never write a book about that long-suffering country, so I shall still have something to be thankful for."
"The public is the one to be thankful," I added.
"That's true, too," she agreed. "It may have cause to be thankful if this second book of mine is never finished, but nevertheless you don't know what a fever of impatience I'm in to see it all smoothly laid out between two pieces of paste-board and ready for the express label to be put on."
"Yes, I believe I do know, though certainly not about a book. I am sure I know what fever of impatience means." But she was so absorbed in her own troubles that she did not notice this indirect acknowledgment of mine.
"I had imagined that I could get my mind into a state of at least comparative tranquillity down here," she kept on. We were out in our favorite lair, a screened-off grassy spot in the side yard, where a double row of althea bushes furnishes a sense of security against intrusion, yet we were close enough to Waterloo to hear him every time he bumped his head or skinned his knee.
"This place is almost unearthly in its quiet beauty," she said after a moment, looking up through the green vista toward the house. The passion flowers were clambering up on the garden fence and running riot over the yellowing cornstalks. Back of the kitchen the well-house lay asleep in the sun, the star-like blossoms of white clematis which covered the roof of the old building were still untouched by that feathery change which forecasts their coming blight.
"It is beautiful—and it certainly is quiet," I coincided with her emphatically.
"Sometimes at home when the telephone bell and the door-bell and the club meetings and the butcher boys and the laundry men have all made a throbbing pain come in my head I steal away up-stairs to my little den where I lock the door and lie down to try to ease that nervous pain. Then I close my eyes and try to project my astral body down here into all this still, summer loveliness. I come up the gravel walk and on to the front porch—oh, those cedar porches! And I go through the shady hall to the back gallery where I find myself face to face with a great cold watermelon that has just been cut."
"And the library is full of roses, and there is a tray of fragrant peaches that Dilsey gathered early in the morning."