Investigating still further, for Mr. Cowan knew the value of detail in estimating human character; the general arrangement of the room won his approval. It was comfortable, settled, serene—it looked like home—it invited the visitor to come in and be at rest. A fire burned in the heater, a bird sang in the kitchen, a cat lay on the lounge and did not move when he sat down beside it, showing that its right of way had not been disputed. Mr. Cowan saw it all.
After the introductions were over, Mr. Cowan put forth some questions about her qualifications, and at each answer, his colleagues were given to understand by a faint twitter of his eyes that Miss Watson was still doing well.
"You're young of course," said Mr. Cowan, with the air of a man who faces facts—but his natural generosity of spirit prompted him to add "but you'll get over that, and anyway a girl is older in her ways than a boy."
"We measure time by heart-beats," said Pearl, as she handed him a flowered cushion to put behind his head, "not by figures on a dial."
She tossed it off easily, as if poetry were the language of every day life to her.
Mr. Cowan shut one eye for the briefest space of time, and across the room his two friends knew Miss Watson's chances were growing brighter every minute. "My wife happened to be down at Chicken Hill the day you spoke, and she said you sure did speak well, for a girl, and she was hopin' you'd speak at our school some night—and we could get a phonograph to liven things up a bit—I guess we're broad-minded enough to listen to a woman."
Mr. Cowan's confidence in his companions was amply justified. They nodded their heads approvingly, like men who are willing to try anything once.
"Well, you see," Mr. Cowan went on, "we have a nice district, Miss Watson. We're farmer people, of course, with the exception of the few who live at the station; we're farmers but we're decent people—and we're pretty well-to-do farmers—we have only one woman in the district—that we sort of wish wasn't there."
"Why," asked Pearl quickly.
"Well you see, she got in first, so to speak. She bought the farm beside the river, and it was her that called the place 'Purple Springs.' It's an outlandish name, but it seems to kind a' stick. There's no springs at all, and they are certainly not purple. But she made the words out of peeled poplar poles, with her axe, and put them up at the front of her house, facin' the track, and the blamed words stick. Mind you, she must have spent months twistin' and turnin' them poles to suit her and get the letters right, and she made a rustic fence to put them on. They're so foolish you can't forget them. She's queer, that's all—and she won't tell who she is, nor where she came from—and she seems to have money."