One morning in early March—it was while the Seaboard trouble was acute—Adelle made her customary rounds of the place to see what was being done. She descended to the cañon and stopped for some time where the stone masons were laying up the wall that was to support the terraces. It was a continuation of the massive wall that rose sheer from the bottom of the little cañon to the front of the house, nearly a hundred feet in all perpendicularly from the bottom course to the first floor of the house. (It was the decision to thrust the house out over the cañon that had necessitated the building of this massive wall and had delayed matters for months.) Adelle had heard Archie grumble about the useless expense caused by this great wall, but she liked it. Its sheer height and strength gave her a pleasant sensation of accomplishment and endurance. She liked to stare up at it as she liked to see great trees or massive mountains or tall buildings. It was a symbol of something humanly important which supplied a secret craving in her soul.
So this morning she stood silently watching the masons at their slow work. One of the men she recognized as having been steadily on the job ever since her arrival at Highcourt. He was a youngish, slender man with sandy hair and blue eyes, and had the unmistakable air of being a native-born American. His sinewy hands were roughened by his work, and his face was almost a brick red, either from constant exposure to the sun or from drinking, probably both. He seemed morose, as if he were consciously ignoring the presence of his "boss," and worked steadily on, once even failing to answer Adelle when she spoke, apparently unconscious of her presence behind him. Adelle liked especially to watch the masons at work. Their clever management of the great stones they had to handle, the precise yet easy way in which they lined and chipped and trigged and mortared, fitting all the detail of their rough mosaic, gave her a pleasant sense of accomplishment such as she had felt in her own efforts with metal and stone. It stirred an instinct for manual labor which was not far down in her character, and actually made her own shapely hands twitch to be at the fascinating work. And the masons' work grew so surely, course upon course, and when done seemed so solid, so eternal!... This morning she lingered longer than usual watching the young mason wield his hammer and trowel. Archie had ruffled her badly with his talk about money losses, and now she felt soothed, freed from stupid perplexities. The mason's large hands, she noted, were supple and dexterous—he made no useless movements. Occasionally he turned his head to spit tobacco or drew off to look at his wall, but these were the only interruptions in his rhythmic motions. He paid no attention whatever to the woman behind him.
Adelle was prettily dressed in a costume of white linen with a cloud of chiffon tied about her small hat and a parasol that she had purchased this summer in Paris, which consisted of an enormous gold lace butterfly. She was fuller in figure than before her child had come and in perfect health, though still pale. Fresh and well cared for, she was if not beautiful very attractive and dainty—all that money could make of her human person. Adelle was not given to prolonged reflection of any sort, but probably she could not help comparing her own dainty, cool, exquisitely clean person with this sweaty, sun-burned, coarse laborer in his black cotton shirt, frayed khaki trousers, and shoes that the lime had burned all color from. She must have felt a complacent sense of physical superiority to the man who was working for her, and perhaps congratulated herself that her lot in the universe had come out such a comfortable one.
The mason rolled up a large stone and prepared to set it home in the bottom course. Adelle observed that he was about to crush one of the Japanese shrubs that she had been at such pains to have planted along the bank of the cañon.
"Look out—don't hurt that bush!" she ordered peremptorily, as she was in the habit of speaking to servants.
The mason tranquilly deposited the rock full upon the shrub and proceeded to slap mortar around it and tap it home with his mallet.
"Didn't you hear me?" Adelle demanded, stepping forward and pointing at the offending rock with her heavily jeweled finger. "Take it out! I don't want the shrubs killed."
The mason looked up for the first time. There was a glint in his clear blue eyes as he said distinctly, without any trace of foreign accent,—
"It's got to go there!"
A smile relaxed his red face, a scornful smile at the impertinence of this dainty specimen of woman-kind who thought that the foundation course of his rock wall could be disturbed for such a trivial matter as a bush.