It passed swiftly, and July and vacation-time came to Una.
CHAPTER XIII
IT was hard enough to get Mr. Wilkins to set a definite date for her summer vacation; the time was delayed and juggled till Mrs. Lawrence, who was to have gone with Una, had to set off alone. But it was even harder for Una to decide where to go for her vacation.
There was no accumulation of places which she had fervently been planning to see. Indeed, Una wasn’t much interested in any place besides New York and Panama; and of the questions and stale reminiscences of Panama she was weary. She decided to go to a farm in the Berkshires largely because she had overheard a girl in the Subway say that it was a good place.
When she took the train she was brave with a new blue suit, a new suit-case, a two-pound box of candy, copies of the Saturday Evening Post and the Woman’s Home Companion, and Jack London’s People of the Abyss, which Mamie Magen had given her. All the way to Pittsfield, all the way out to the farm by stage, she sat still and looked politely at every large detached elm, every cow or barefoot boy.
She had set her methodical mind in order; had told herself that she would have time to think and observe. Yet if a census had been taken of her thoughts, not sex nor economics, not improving observations of the flora and fauna of western Massachusetts, would have been found, but a half-glad, half-hysterical acknowledgment that she had not known how tired and office-soaked she was till now, when she had relaxed, and a dull, recurrent wonder if two weeks would be enough to get the office poison out of her body. Now that she gave up to it, she was so nearly sick that she couldn’t see the magic of the sheer green hillsides and unexpected ponds, the elm-shrined winding road, towns demure and white. She did not notice the huge, inn-like farm-house, nor her bare room, nor the noisy dining-room. She sat on the porch, exhausted, telling herself that she was enjoying the hill’s slope down to a pond that was yet bright as a silver shield, though its woody shores had blurred into soft darkness, the enchantment of frog choruses, the cooing pigeons in the barn-yard.
“Listen. A cow mooing. Thank the Lord I’m away from New York—clean forgotten it—might be a million miles away!” she assured herself.
Yet all the while she continued to picture the office—Bessie’s desk, Mr. Wilkins’s inkwell, the sinister gray scrub-rag in the wash-room, and she knew that she needed some one to lure her mind from the office.
She was conscious that some man had left the chattering rocking-chair group at the other end of the long porch and had taken the chair beside her.