Yes, the New Lady is a wholly satisfactory guest. She even pretended not to notice Peter's father who, as we alighted, came singing by, and bowed to us, his barren old face lighted with a smile, as a vacant room is lighted, revealing the waste. If I had some one staying with me who had smiled at Peter's father or—at any one, or who did not see the village as it is, I think I should be tempted to do as my neighbour did to me that morning: pick three carnation pinks for her and watch her go away.
XII THE WAY THE WORLD IS
Was it not inevitable that poor, lonely Nicholas Moor should have sought out my New Lady? A night or two after her arrival he saw her again, at a supper in the church "lecture-room." He was bringing in a great freezer of ice-cream and when she greeted him he had all but dropped the freezer. Then a certain, big obvious deacon whose garden adjoined my own had come importantly and snatched the burden away, and the boy had stood, shamefast, trying to say something; but his face was lighted as at a summons. So the New Lady had divined his tragedy, the loneliness which his shyness masked as some constant plight of confusion.
"Come and see me sometime," she had impulsively bidden him. "Do you know where I am staying?"
Did he know that! Since he had seen her in the meadow had he known anything else? And after some days of hard trying he came one night, arriving within the dusk as behind a wall. Even in the twilight, when he was once under the poplars, he did not know what way to look. To seem to look straight along the road was unnatural. To seem to look out across the opposite fields was hypocrisy. To look at the house which held the New Lady was unthinkable. So, as he went in at the gate and up the fern-bordered walk, he examined the back of his hand—near, and then a little farther away. As he reached the steps he was absorbedly studying his thumb.
From a place of soft light, shed through a pink box shade on the table, and of scattered willow chairs and the big leaves of plants, the New Lady came toward him.
"You did come!" she said. "I thought you wouldn't, really."
With the utmost effort Nicholas detached one hand from his hat brim and gave it her. From head to foot he was conscious, not of the touch of her hand, little and soft, but of the bigness and coarseness of his own hand.