"Now don't joggle," Bess commanded as we got all settled and tucked in.
"Mrs. Tillett lets little Tillett sleep with her cold nights," I murmured drowsily.
"I don't believe it; no woman would undertake the responsibility of human life like that," Bess answered as she tucked in a loose end of cover under the pillow.
"Most of the world mothers sleep with their babies," Adam said when I told him about little Tillett, "and—" I was answering when I trailed off into a dream of walking a tight rope over a million white eggs. In the morning Bess said she had dreamed that she was a steam roller trying to make a road of eggs smooth enough to run her car over.
CHAPTER VII
Also Bess and I woke to find ourselves heroines. Matthew came to breakfast after he had seen the lamps in his mock hens burning brightly, and brought Polly with him to congratulate us on the rescue of our infant industry. Polly had told him of our brilliant coup against old Jack Frost, and he was all enthusiasm, as was also Uncle Cradd, while father beamed because he was hearing me praised and thought of something else at the same time. Later Owen Murray came out for Bess in his car, and insisted on buying six more of the eggs, because, he said, they had now become a sporting proposition and interested him. Bess agreed to board them to maturity in her conservatory for him at fifty cents a day per head and let him visit them at any time. He gave me a check immediately. He offered to buy six of Polly's chicks at the same price, but Matthew refused to let her sell them at all, and also Bess refused to have any mixing of breeds in her conservatory. Polly didn't know enough to resent losing the hundred and twenty dollars, because she had never had more than fifty cents in her life, and Matthew didn't realize what it would have meant to her to have that much money, because he had more than he needed all his life, so they were all happy and laughed through one of Rufus' worst hog effusions in the way of a meal for lunchers, but—but I had in a month learned to understand what a dollar might mean to a man or woman, and at the thought of that two hundred and forty dollars Mr. G. Bird and family had earned for me in their second month of my ownership my courage arose and girded up its loins for the long road ahead. I knew enough to know that these returns were a kind of isolated nugget in the poultry business, and yet why not?
"We'll sell Mr. Evan Baldwin a five-hundred-dollar gold egg yet, Mr. G. Bird," I said to myself.
After luncheon they all departed and left me to my afternoon's work. Matthew lingered behind the others and helped me feed the old red ally and Mrs. Ewe and Peckerwood Pup.
"I was talking to Evan Baldwin at the club after his first lecture the other night and, Ann, I believe I'll be recruited for the plow as well as for the machine-gun. I'm going to buy some land out there back of the Beesleys' and raise sheep on it. He says Harpeth is losing millions a year by not raising sheep. I'm going to live at Riverfield a lot of the time and motor back and forth to business. Truly, Ann, the land bug has bit me and—and it isn't just—just to come up on your blind side. But, dear, now don't you think that it would be nice for me to live over here with you as a perfectly sympathetic agricultural husband?"