She stretched one arm wide, embracing Nature, as it were.
“Because the day is very good, and because the apple is sweet, and because—because I am alive.” She bit again into the apple.
Peregrine eyed her approvingly. “Three most excellent reasons. You find happiness in life?”
“Why not?” quoth she between her munching. “Is it not well to be alive? Does not the sun shine for me, the wind blow for me, the earth bear fruit for me, the birds sing to me? Truly I find happiness in life.”
“You envy none?” asked Peregrine.
She laughed. “Whom should I envy? Old Mother Esther down yonder, who has three cows, and is toothless, and has a wart as big as a hazel-nut on her nose? Grizel Burnside, who has a husband who beats her six nights out of the seven, and half a dozen squalling brats tugging at her skirts? Lambert Groot, who they say has a bag of gold pieces he counts the while he yells with rheumatic pains? For my part, I say let Esther keep her cows and her wart and her lack of teeth; Grizel, her husband and her brats; Lambert, his gold and his rheumatism. I am happier with our one cow, my own teeth, my freedom, and my health. I’d barter no jot nor tittle of my own self for all their belongings in a heap at my feet. I am I, and glad on it.” An unconscious egoist, she faced him laughing from the ladder.
“Yet,” suggested Peregrine, “there are others rich, well-fed, and with good health,—plenty of them in the world. Do you not envy them?”
“Not I,” laughed the girl. “How know I that, for all their solid riches, they love the gold of the buttercups in April? that, for all their good feeding, they would pluck and eat blackberries from the hedges along with a juicy apple? that, for all their health they could, race the dewy meadows bare-footed, face the August sun uncovered, or meet a January snow-storm unshrinking. Sooner be myself with the likings I know, than they with tastes more than perchance foreign to me.”
“My child,” said Peregrine gaily, “I appreciate your confidence in yourself. An’ a man have confidence in himself ’twill lead him far.”
She looked at him from beneath her eyelashes. “Whither hath it led you?” she asked demurely.