“Bless the man!” cried his hostess. “I don’t mean you. I mean Kitty. But that girl never could keep her face straight. She always favored me more than her father.”
This statement was not difficult to believe, for Hiram at that moment looked as if he had never smiled in his life. He sat silent throughout the meal, but Mrs. Bartlett talked quite enough for two.
“Well, for my part,” she said, “I don’t know what farming’s coming to! Henry Howard and Margaret drove past here this afternoon as proud as Punch in their new covered buggy. Things is very different from what they was when I was a girl. Then a farmer’s daughter had to work. Now Margaret’s took her diploma at the ladies’ college, and Arthur he’s begun at the university, and Henry’s sporting round in a new buggy. They have a piano there, with the organ moved out into the back room.”
“The whole Howard lot’s a stuck-up set,” muttered the farmer.
But Mrs. Bartlett wouldn’t have that. Any detraction that was necessary she felt competent to supply, without help from the nominal head of the house.
“No, I don’t go so far as to say that. Neither would you, Hiram, if you hadn’t lost your lawsuit about the line fence; and served you right, too, for it wouldn’t have been begun if I had been at home at the time. Not but what Margaret’s a good housekeeper, for she wouldn’t be her mother’s daughter if she wasn’t that; but it does seem to me a queer way to raise farmers’ children, and I only hope they can keep it up. There were no pianos nor French and German in my young days.”
“You ought to hear her play! My lands!” cried young Bartlett, who spoke for the first time. His admiration for her accomplishment evidently went beyond his powers of expression.
Bartlett himself did not relish the turn the conversation had taken, and he looked somewhat uneasily at the two strangers. The professor’s countenance was open and frank, and he was listening with respectful interest to Mrs. Bartlett’s talk. Yates bent over his plate with flushed face, and confined himself strictly to the business in hand.
“I am glad,” said the professor innocently to Yates, “that you made the young lady’s acquaintance. I must ask you for an introduction.”
For once in his life Yates had nothing to say, but he looked at his friend with an expression that was not kindly. The latter, in answer to Mrs. Bartlett’s inquiries, told how they had passed Miss Howard on the road, and how Yates, with his usual kindness of heart, had offered the young woman the hospitalities of the hay rack. Two persons at the table were much relieved when the talk turned to the tent. It was young Hiram who brought about this boon. He was interested in the tent, and he wanted to know. Two things seemed to bother the boy: First, he was anxious to learn what diabolical cause had been at work to induce two apparently sane men to give up the comforts of home and live in this exposed manner, if they were not compelled to do so. Second, he desired to find out why people who had the privilege of living in large cities came of their own accord into the uninteresting country, anyhow. Even when explanations were offered, the problem seemed still beyond him.