"Aye, aye, sir," said Olivia; and she sat down, and I regret to say that she giggled.
I had gone down the steps, and I was regarding a red rubber cap and a dun-colored raincoat. The red cap was pulled well down over the ears, concealing entirely the colors of Eve's great beaver muff. I spoke.
"Miss Radnor," I said, "what have you done with Bobby?"
She looked up quickly, and her eyes met mine frankly. They—hers, not mine, my eyes being nothing to look at, only to see with; but hers—they were hazel, I should guess, and they were veiled mischief as they looked into mine.
"Bobby?" she asked. "Mr. Leverett? Oh, we transferred him yesterday. We took him down in the Arcadia. We'll take you some day soon."
I have no wish to be transferred. But I do not wonder that Bobby is much taken with Elizabeth Radnor.
V
Tilling the soil, if the man who tills be working alone, tends to reflection,—provided that man possesseth wherewith to reflect,—and it promotes straight and simple thinking, thoughts which may be straight and true or they may not; but the thoughts of the tiller of the soil are more likely to be straight and true than the thoughts of the same man riding in a motor-car or working on the twenty-fifth floor of an office building. If such a man be the president of the company it is one thing; he may be puffed up with the pride of a little brief authority or he may be the simple, true man that Old Goodwin is. His sense of the values of things must be warped and distorted unless he tills the soil at times or does something that is equivalent, like sailing the deep blue oceans, where there is so very little between him and the workings of nature; and I do not mean sailing as a passenger in an ocean steamer or a yacht, in which he will have as little to do with the workings of nature as he would in a great hotel.