When he met her at the breakfast table she was serene again, and held up her cheek like a flower to be pressed against his lips. She had taken command of the household, imperious as a young queen, a-simmer with overbubbling pride like a little girl suddenly hoisted to the head of the table in her mother’s absence.
Womanlike, she found a strange comfort in the discovery that the china in the house was good, the linen of quality, and the silver dignified. She had erudition of a sort, in a field where he was blankly ignorant. She recognized at once that the gleaming coffee pot was from the elegant hand of Paul Revere himself.
“I didn’t know he was a silversmith,” said RoBards.
“What else was he famous for?” Patty said.
This dazed him as a pretty evidence of the profound difference between a male and a female mind. He started to tell her about what Paul Revere had done when she began to praise his mother’s taste in china. She laughed:
“You never saw the pieces of china I did, did you, Mist’ RoBards?”
“You did china? You never showed me any!”
“It was nothing to boast of. But when I was a little girl at Mrs. Okill’s school, I drew a pattern of a tea-set—a wreath of sweet peas and convolvulus surrounding my initial and a lamb holding a cross. My cousin Peter, who was going out to China as a supercargo, said he would take it with him and have it put on a tea-set. He made fun of my drawing and wrote on the design under the lamb: ‘This is not a wig, but a lamb.’ And in about a year the set came round the Horn in one of my uncle’s ships. But the foolish, long-tailed apes in China had put on every cup and saucer the words, ‘This is not a wig, but a lamb.’ I cried for days, and broke every piece to flinders.”
She could laugh with him now, and when she laughed he found a new excuse for a new adoration. He was not gifted in frivolity, and the old house seemed to store up her mirth for dark days when remembered laughter would make a more heartbreaking echo than the remembered drip of tears.
Breakfast left his soul famished for her love, but she would not be serious. She flitted and chirped like a bird that lures a hunter away from her nest.