"To know this lady—like the mother of Weeliam—and Mr. Pawket, my first American of the famous farmer trrribes!"
The stranger's insecurity of English had its immediate triumph. The countryside had expected that she would chatter Italian like a predatory organ-grinder, but around this picturesque naïveté they clustered as they would around a lost child. Jessica Folsom met the architect's eyes triumphantly, but he edged to her side and bent to whiff the roses, muttering, "The worst is yet to come."
However, the slender figure of Mrs. Folsom drifted from one to the other of her welcomers, unembarrassed, friendly, appealing. She put them immediately at their ease as she announced:
"We shall all at once have tea. On the terrace—my little festa! I, who find the home of my fathers in your new green country." A lovely color coming into her dark face, she burst into undulating Italian. "The first Dago she's spoke sence she's got here," commented Mr. Fripp, in an undertone. Once more he creaked up to the mistress of the villa, saying, loudly:
"Too bad about the furniture!"
The new-comer turned upon the junction agent liquid, long-lashed eyes. "Ah the garnitures of Bella Fortuna, they have been—how do you say it, Weeliam?—dislocated, smashed in traveling the great waves." She appealed anxiously to the junction agent. "I fear they are in great distress of breaking, but"—a light came into the appealing dark eyes—"but in your so practical country shall we not find the new?"
Mrs. Pawket, hearing this, suddenly nudged her husband, and Mr. Pawket realized that his moment had come. He took one or two ponderous steps forward, wiping his brow, clearing his throat. In his buzzing brain he sensed a great occasion, like a wedding or a funeral. He got a glimpse of Mrs. Pawket nodding her head urgently and mouthing his words after him as he roared:
"That's as may be; that's as may be." Again Mr. Pawket cleared his throat. He felt, as he afterward expressed it, "like he was grindin' a corn-hopper with nothing into it." Suddenly his gaze fell upon Willum, his boy, now a glad-looking man with a tender light in his eyes and his arm around his dark-eyed wife. This, Mr. Pawket felt, was as it should be. It gave him sudden eloquence.
"I dunno," he said, and he bent a severe eye upon the Rural, Mr. Fripp, and the hotel-keeper's daughter—"I dunno but what we was gettin' a little sour-hearted, here in Brook Center. There has been some spites and a good many mean doin's and sayin's—namin' no names. What we didn't have was big feelin's. Everybody was nesty and nifty, and we all thought we know'd it all; but it seems that yet for all we didn't know much about vanillas nor that they could turn out so purty as this here vanilla has gone and turned."
William Folsom poked the architect in the ribs. "Hear! Hear!" he murmured, in a subdued voice.