The motor turned in at a neglected driveway, forbidding with black tree-trunks, and whirled up to the piazza of a brick house, an ugly survival of the early country mansion. Mrs. Pole, who was bending over a baby carriage within a sun parlor, came forward, a smile of welcome on her pale face. She seemed very small and fragile as she stood above them on the steps, and her thin, delicate face had the marked lines of a woman of forty. She said in her slow, Southern voice, which had a pleasant human quality:—
"I hope you weren't mired. The roads are something awful about here. I am so glad to see you both."
When she spoke her face lost some of the years.
"It is a long way out,—one can't exactly run in on you, Margaret! If it hadn't been for Isabelle's magnificent car, you might have died without seeing me!" Conny poured forth.
"It is a journey; but you see people don't run in on us often."
"You've got a landscape," Conny continued, turning to look across the bare treetops towards the Sound. It would have been a pleasant prospect except for the eruption of small houses on every side. "But how can you stand it the whole year round? Are there any civilized people—in those houses?" She indicated vaguely the patch of wooden villas below.
"Very few, I suppose, according to your standard, Cornelia. But we don't know them. I pulled up the drawbridge when we first came."
Mrs. Pole's thin lips twitched with mirth, and Conny, who was never content with mere inference, asked bluntly:—
"Then what do you do with yourselves—evenings?" Her tone reflected the emptiness of the landscape, and she added with a treble laugh, "I've always wondered what suburban life is like!"
"Oh, you eat and read and sleep. Then there are the children daytimes. I help teach 'em. We live the model life,—flowers and shrubs in the summer, I suppose…. The Bishop was with me for a time."