Adam tried not to stare, but his effort was futile.
“Good morning,” she said, with a bright smile.
“Why, Mrs. Virey, I—I hardly knew you!” he stammered.
“Thanks. I feel complimented. It is the first time you’ve looked at me. Shorn of my dignity—no, my worldliness, do I begin well, desert man?... No more stuffy dresses clogging my feet! No more veils to protect my face! Let the sun burn! I want to work. I want to help. I want to learn. If madness must be mine, let it be a madness to learn what in this God-forsaken land ever made you the man you are. There, Sir Wansfell, I have flung down the gage.”
“Very well,” replied Adam, soberly.
“And now,” she continued, “I am eager to work. If I blunder, be patient. If I am stupid, make me see. And if I faint in the sun or fall beside the trail, remember it is my poor body that fails, and not my will.”
So, in the light of her keen interest, Adam found the humdrum mixing of dough and the baking of bread a pleasure and a lesson to him, rather than a task.
“Ah! how important are the homely things of life!” she said. “A poet said ‘we live too much in the world.’... I wonder did he mean just this. We grow away from or never learn the simple things. I remember my grandfather’s farm—the plowed fields, the green corn, the yellow wheat, the chickens in the garden, the mice in the barn, the smell of hay, the smell of burning leaves, the smell of the rich brown earth.... Wansfell, not for years have I remembered them. Something about you, the way you worked over that bread, like a nice old country lady, made me remember.... Oh, I wonder what I have missed!”
“We all miss something. It can’t be helped. But there are compensations, and it’s never too late.”
“You are a child, with all your bigness. You have the mind of a child.”