"Wooden," said Jimmie shortly and without stress.
Much as she hated to, Augusta let the criticism stand. She threw the cover over the machine without a word. That was the end of a dream which Augusta had been hugging to her heart for months. Now Augusta, as we know, was a high hearted, high handed little lady, and she always knew that her way was right. Remembering this, we may arrive at some idea of what it cost her to drop, without a whimper, even as she dropped the cover over the machine, her dearest, deepest laid little plan, and to say blithely:
"Come on for a run around the lake! Tomorrow you can have a pad and pencil and sit on the back of your neck with your feet up in the window and scribble your own way."
Wardwell knew the cost of it.
The next day was rainy and Jimmie was forced to sit about the house all day. He was still near enough to his recent sickness to feel peevish and irritable when it rained, he hated wind and rain. He grudgingly envied Augusta for the carelessness with which she could run out into the rain. He noticed that she made wholly unnecessary trips out to the stable, away beyond the end of the sugar cabin, to see if Donahue was all right. Donahue was perfectly all right, Jimmie was sure. He did not see that lumps of sugar did the old fool any good, anyhow.
In short, Jimmie was working himself into a thorough stew of working fever, ripping and tearing viciously at the work which he and Augusta had been so faithfully laboring on, and incidentally scrapping down some very good paragraphs which he knew, with a growl of satisfaction for each one, would stand the test.
He did not know that Augusta was having a little cry every time she went to the stable. Neither did he know that the lumps of sugar, which he denounced as being wholly unsuited to Donahue's digestion, were in reality the "thirty pieces of silver," with which, in Augusta's imagination, Donahue was being betrayed. So Jimmie could not know that Augusta, too, was developing a temperament. He was entirely unprepared for its demonstration.
"Rot!" he grunted, jabbing his pencil through something he had just written and beginning to write again furiously, meanwhile trying to sit on his left shoulder blade in the chair with his feet piled up in the window.
The room was small. The stove was smoking a little. It was only three o'clock. There were, for Augusta, interminable hours to be gone through before she could even pretend to busy herself with getting supper. And a certain matter was working vividly upon her conscience.
"Shucks!" she remarked. "I could write a book myself with less fuss, and not lose my temper about it, either."