We passed through the house. The kitchen, dining-room, and hall were finished and the paint drying. They looked very fresh and bright. The south room, as we stepped into it, was flooded with sunlight and cheerful with rugs and books. Flinging wide the glass door, we stepped out upon the terrace of the pergola-to-be, and looked toward the new bird bath. Upon its rim sat a song sparrow! Even as we watched, another came and fluttered his feet and breast daintily through the trembling little mirror of water. Then came a robin and drove them both away.
“The pig!” laughed Miss Goodwin. “Do you know, I’ve got a poorer opinion of robins since I came here. We city dwellers think of robins as harbingers of spring, and all that, and they epitomize the bird world. But when you really are in that world, you find they are rather large and vulgar and–and sort of upper West Side-y. They aren’t half so nice as the song sparrows, or the Peabodies, and, of course, compared with the thrushes–well, it’s like comparing Owen Meredith with Keats, isn’t it?”
“Don’t be too hard on the robins,” I smiled.
We looked our fill at the new bird bath, which was already functioning, as she said her boss on the dictionary would put it, and at the white sundial pillar, and at our prospective aqueduct of roses, and at the farm and the far hills beyond–and then she suddenly announced with great energy that she was going to saw wood.
“You may saw just one piece,” said I, “and then you are going to take a book and rest. I’m going to work, myself. Twin Fires is getting in shape fast enough now so I can give up part of the daytime to the purely mundane task of paying the bills.”
I wheeled up a big dead apple branch from the orchard to the wood shed, put it on the buck, gave her the buck-saw, and watched her first efforts, grinning.
“Go away,” she laughed. “You bother me.”
So I went, opened the west window by my desk to the wandering summer breeze, and went at my toil. Presently I heard her tiptoeing into the room.
“Done?” said I.
She nodded. “Now I want–let’s see what I want–well, I guess ’Marius the Epicurean’ and ’Alice in Wonderland’ will do. I’m going to sit in the orchard. You work here till five or your salary will be docked. Good-bye.”