“Mrs. Temple,” said I, “your solicitude quite overwhelms me. Comfort me with petticoats! Good Lord! And an anæmic, too! I’ll bet she has nerves! When can Mrs. Pillig come to me, woman?”
Mrs. Bert’s eyes closed still farther. “Oh, your house ain’t near ready yet,” she said. “Why, the painters ain’t even began.”
I fled to my chamber, and hauled forth a manuscript. A female boarder! No doubt she’d expect me to shave every day and change my working clothes for the noonday dinner! Heavens! probably she’d come down and advise me how to lay out my garden! So far, I had been blissfully free from advice. I had gone to the village just once–to open my account at the bank. I had not met a soul in the town. One or two of the early arrivals on the estates had driven by in their cars and stared curiously, but I had ignored them. I didn’t want advice. I was having fun in my own way.
“Hang Mrs. Temple!” I muttered, reading a whole paragraph of manuscript without taking in a word of it. In fact, I gave up all attempt to work, and crossly and wearily went to bed, where I lay on one of my strained shoulders and dreamed that a sick female with spectacles was hauling at my arm and begging me to come and rescue her sciatic nerve, which had fallen into my not-yet-built garden pool and was being swallowed by a gold fish.
Chapter VI
THE HERMIT SINGS AT TWILIGHT
The next morning I demanded that Mrs. Temple again put me up some lunch. “For,” said I, “I’m going to postpone meeting this broken-down wreck of a perhaps once proud female as long as possible.”
“Maybe when you see her drive by you’ll be sorry,” Mrs. Bert smiled.
“I shall be working on the south side of the house,” I retorted.
I had not been long at my place, indeed, I had scarcely finished watering my seed bed and carting out my daily stint of two barrow loads of slash from the orchard, when I heard the road scraper rattling over the bridge by the brook. Mike came from the vegetable garden and met his “frind Morrissy,” to whom I was ceremoniously presented.