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"Up to Proudfit House the conservatory wasn't set aside from everyday living for just a place to be walked through and looked at and left behind for something better. It was a glass regular room, full of green, but not so full that it left you out of account. Willow chairs and a family of books and open windows into the other rooms made the conservatory all of a piece with the house, and at one end the tile was let go up in a big You-and-me looking fireplace, like a sort of shrine for fire, I use' to think, in the middle of a temple to flowers, and like both belonged to the household.
"On the day of the evening company at Proudfit House Robin was sitting with a book in this room. I'd gone up that day to do what I could to help out, and to see to Christopher some. Him I'd put to taking his nap quite awhile before, and I was fussing with the plants like I love to do—it seems as if while I pick off dead leaves and give the roots a drink I was kind of doing their thinking for them. When I heard Alex Proudfit coming acrost the library, I started to go, but Robin says to me, 'Don't go, Miss Marsh,' she says, 'stay here and do what you're doing—if you don't mind.'
"'Land,' thinks I, turning back to the ferns, 'never tell me that young ladies are getting more up-to-date in love than they use' to be. My day, she would of liked that they should be alone, so be she could manage it without seeming to.'
"I donno but I'm foolish, but it always seems to me that a minute like that had ought to catch fire and leap up, like a time by itself. In all the relationships of men and women, it seems like no little commonplace time is so vital as the minute when the man comes into a room where a woman is a-waiting for him. There is about it something of time to be when he'll come, not to gloat over his day's kill, or to forget his day's care, but to talk with her about their day of hardy work. Habitual arriving in a room again and again for ever can never quite take off, seems though, the edge of that coming back to where she is.... But somehow, that day, Alex Proudfit must have stepped through the door before the minute had quite caught fire, and Robin merely smiled up at him, calm and idle, from her low chair as he come to a chair beside her.
"'Tea, Robin Redbreast,' says he, 'is going to be here in a minute, with magnificent macaroons. But I think that you and I will have it by ourselves. Everybody is either asleep or pretending. I'm glad,' he tells her, 'you're the sort that can do things in the evening without resting up for from nine to ten hours preceding.'
"'I'm resting now,' Robin said; 'this is quite heavenly—this green room.'
"He looked at her, eager. 'Do you like it?' he asked. 'I mean the room—the house?'
"'Enormously,' she told him. 'How could I help it?'