It was a long while before Sheila could comfort her children and convince them that it was all “pretend.”
After that, when they were incorrigible, she could always cow them by threatening, “If you don’t I’ll scream.”
The children would have been glad to make little canoes from the bark of the birch, but Sheila would not let them peel off the delicate human-like skin. The tree meant much to her, for she and Bret had been wont to climb up to it before there were any amateur Indians. Bret had carved their names on it in two linked hearts.
On the lawn in front of the house there was another birch-tree. It amused Bret to name the tree on the hill “Sheila” and the tree on the lawn “Bret.” And the nearest approach he ever made to poetry was to pretend that they were longing for each other. He probably absorbed that idea from the dimly remembered lyric of the pine-tree and the palm.
Sheila suggested that the birch from the lawn should climb up and dwell with the lonely tree on the heights. Bret objected that he and Sheila would never see them then, for they made few such excursions nowadays.
It struck him as a better idea to bring “Sheila” down to “Bret.” He decided to surprise his wife with the view of them together. He chose a day when Sheila was to take the children to a Sunday-school picnic. On his way to the office he spoke to the old German gardener he had inherited from his father. When Bret told him of his inspiration the old man (Gottlieb Hauf, his name was) shook his head and crinkled his thin lips with the superiority of learning for ignorance. He drawled:
“You shouldn’t do so,” and, as if the matter were ended, bent to snip a shrub he was manicuring.
“But I want it,” Bret insisted.
“You shouldn’t vant it,” and snipped again.
Opposition always hardened Bret. He took the shears from the old man and stood him up. “You do as I tell you—for once.”