“And who is Wanza Lyttle?”
“Oh, Wanza is a wonderful girl,” I answered, warming to my part. “She drives a peddler’s cart. I’ve no doubt she will call on you. There never was such a peddler’s cart as Wanza’s, I’ll give you my word. It has a green umbrella with a pink lining, and two green wheels with pink spokes, and Wanza’s buckskin pony is never without a green paper rosette for his harness—”
“You’re not telling me much about Wanza, after all,” Haidee interrupted, opening her velvet eyes wide, and favoring me with an odd glance.
“Oh, but I am, I am going on to tell you that Wanza lined the green umbrella herself, and painted her cart. She is very capable. She makes cherry pies that melt in your mouth. And her tatting!—you should see her tatting.”
“It’s on all her dresses, I suppose?”
“It is. And her dresses are pink and starchy. Yes,” I ended, “Wanza is very capable, indeed—” I hesitated. It was awkward not knowing what to call my wonder woman.
“My name is Judith Batterly,” she said quietly, seeing my hesitation—“Mrs. Batterly. I am a widow.”
A turbulent tide of crimson swept up to her brow as she spoke. Her eyes sought the ground. There was a silence. The sun had forsaken its nest of feathery clouds and all the shy woodland things began to prink and preen. A flycatcher ruffled its olive plumage on an old stump in the spring, a blue jay jargoned stridently. Above our heads tiny butterflies floated—an iridescent, turquoise cloud. A fragrant steam arose from the damp earth.
As the sound of my trusty ax rang through the woods, and I chopped and sawed with a will all through the morning, I asked myself what it mattered to me whether Haidee were maid, wife or widow. I asked myself this, over and over again, and I did not answer my own question.
By noon I was hot, streaming with perspiration, and covered with chips and sawdust. I was inspecting a symmetrical, soaring white fir-tree that towered some fifty feet distant from the cabin, when a voice behind me cried: “No, no!” so peremptorily, that I started.