One of the waiters had brought them ice-cream and cake, and after she had tasted the cake Phil caught Rose Bartlett's eye and expressed ecstasy and gratitude by a lifting of the head, a closing of the eyes, a swift folding of the hands.
"How are you going to amuse yourself out there by yourself all winter?" she remarked to Fred; "I shouldn't think there would be much to do!"
"Oh, there won't be any trouble about that! I've got plenty to do and then I want to do some studying, too. I'm going up to the University in January to hear lectures—farming and stock-raising and things like that. Perry has put me up to it. And then in between times I want to get acquainted with the neighbors; they're all mighty nice people and kind and friendly. That sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?"
"Well, it sounds wholesome if not wildly exciting. I've lost my job. They took my kitchen away from me just as I was getting started; and I haven't anything much to do—except being sociable."
"Of course, you've come out now, and you'll be going to receptions and dances all the time."
"I can't exactly cry O joy, O joy at the thought of it. There must have been gypsies in my family somewhere. You'll think I'm crazy, but I'd like to go out right now and run a mile. But there will be skating afterwhile; and snowstorms to go walking in. I like walking in snowstorms,—the blustering kind where you can't see and go plunking into fences."
Fred agreed to this; he readily visualized Phil tramping 'cross-country in snowstorms. "It's an awful thing," Phil resumed, "to have to be respectable. Aunt Kate wants to go South this winter and take me with her. But that would mean being shut up in a hotel. If daddy didn't have to work, I'd make him take me to California where we could get a wagon and just keep camping. Camping out is the most fun there is in this world. There's a nice wooziness in waking up at night and hearing an owl right over your head; and there are the weather changes, when you go to sleep with the stars shining and wake up and hear the rain slapping the tent. And when you've gone for a long tramp and come back tired and wet and hungry, and sit and talk about things awhile and then tumble into bed and get up in the morning to do it all over again—! Does that sound perfectly wild? If it does, then I'm crazy, for that's the kind of thing I like—not to talk about it at parties in my best clothes, but to go out and do it and keep on doing it forever and ever."
She put the last crumb of the Bartlett cake into her mouth meditatively.
"I like the outdoors, too," said Fred, for whom this statement of her likings momentarily humanized his goddess and brought her within the range of his understanding. "The earth is a good old earth. There are no jars in the way she does her business. There's something that makes me feel sort o' funny inside when I go out now and see that little wheat-patch of mine, and know that the snow is going to cover it, and that with any kind of good luck it's going to live right through the cold and come to harvest next summer. And it gives me a queer feeling, and always did, the way it all goes on—and has always gone on since the beginning of the world. When I was a little boy here in Montgomery and went to Center Church Sunday-School, the most interesting things in the Bible were about those Old Testament people, raising cattle and tending flocks and farming just like the people right here at home. I suppose it's a feeling like that I always had that makes me want to be a farmer and live close to the ground—that and wanting to earn a living," he concluded, smiling. He was astonished at his own speech, which had expressed ideas that had never crystallized in his mind before.
"That," said Phil, "is what poetry is—feeling like that."