“I think I like them.” Mary looked apologetic.
“Because you are a little old lady! And I wasn’t—and am not!” cried Mrs. Garden.
“I don’t like them, either!” cried Jane. “But Mary loves fun, madrina. You see she hasn’t been thinking of anything but getting you well.”
“Surely I see,” returned Mrs. Garden, with the smile that always made new applause burst forth when she acknowledged applause from her audiences. “If you three little grandmothers of mine hadn’t so far succeeded in getting me well, I suppose I should be quite content to sun myself in the garden, like a lizard. But—— Yet it’s really very charming here in this garden and house! When my boxes get here I shall have no end of things to show you. You’ve no notion of the scrapbooks I’m bringing, with my programmes and press notices in them, and I’m afraid there’ll be so many photographs of me you’ll be impatient of them. But one’s press agent demands constant sittings.”
“It must seem dreadfully dull, madrina,” said Mary, rising with a line between her clouded eyes. “Only wait! I should think you could wake Vineclad when you feel stronger. Perhaps it won’t be so hard on you by and by. Poor little singing linnet! Much as I love to have you for my own, I think I’m able to wish it had not happened. I can faintly guess how hard it is to drop out of all that glory and come home to three little crude daughters, whom you don’t know and who can’t entertain you. Let me shake up that pillow!”
“You ought rather to shake me, sweet Mary!” cried her mother sincerely, not deaf, in spite of her regret for what she had lost, to the pathos in this dear girl’s voice, nor blind to the patient, self-forgetful depth of her pitying love. “I’ll get on. It’s a great thing to find you—each what you are.”
“Well, I know I’d feel like an uprooted plant from the king’s garden, dying on a country stone wall, if I were in your place!” cried Jane, with an explosion that amazed her mother.
“You are the most like me of the three, Janie,” she said. “But I was never the little stick of dynamite that you are. I was merely a girl that loved her own way of being happy and found it. I never cared with the force you do; I liked and disliked quietly, and quietly slipped through what I disliked and chose what I liked. I still like pleasantness; it isn’t particularly pleasant to feel too strongly, I fancy; I really never tried it. So I mean to enjoy rusting out here in Vineclad with you—somehow! I haven’t found the way yet. Don’t look so anxious, Mary sweetheart. How did they happen to call you Mary? You are Martha, now, ‘troubled about many things.’ No, you’re not! You are precisely what we mean when we say Mary!” Mrs. Garden lightly swayed herself backward and tipped up her face to invite Mary to kiss her, which she did, with heart as well as lips, feeling that this exotic must blossom and brighten in their garden at any cost.
Later, in the pantry, Jane came upon Mary shaking the lettuce for lunch out of its cold-water submersion. She looked up, as Jane came in, with such a sober face that Jane shook her, lightly, much as she was shaking the lettuce.
“You look like a frost-bitten Garden,” Jane declared, “and there’s no sense!”