"Robin leaned forward, but I guess he thought that was because of her sympathy. He went right on:—
"'I want never to speak of this to anyone else, but I can't help telling you. You—understand. You know what I'm driving at. Alex Proudfit is a good man—as men are counted good. And he's a perfect host, a fascinating companion. But he's a type of the most dangerous selfishness that walks the world—'
"Robin suddenly laid her hand, just for a flash, on Insley's arm.
"'You mustn't tell me,' she says. 'I ought to have told you before. Alex Proudfit—I'm going to be Alex Proudfit's wife.'
V
"In the next days things happened that none of us Friendship Village ladies is likely ever to forget. Some of the things was nice and some was exciting, and some was the kind that's nice after you've got the introduction wore off; but all of them was memorable. And most all of them was the kind that when you're on the train looking out the car window, or when you're home sitting in the dusk before it's time to light the lamp, you fall to thinking about and smiling over, and you have them always around with you, same as heirlooms you've got ready for yourself.
"One of these was the Fourth of July that year. It fell a few days after Alex Proudfit come, and the last of the days was full of his guests arriving to the house party. The two Proudfit cars was racking back and forth to the station all day long, and Jimmy Sturgis, he went near crazy with getting the baggage up. I never see such a lot of baggage. 'Land, land,' says Mis' Toplady, peeking out her window at it, 'you'd think they was all trees and they'd come bringing extra sets of branches, regular forest size.' Mis' Emmons and Robin and Christopher went up the night before the Fourth—Mis' Emmons was going to do the chaperoning, and Alex had asked me to be up there all I could to help him. He knows how I love to have a hand in things. However, I couldn't be there right at first, because getting ready for the Fourth of July was just then in full swing.
"Do you know what it is to want to do over again something that you ain't done for years and years? I don't care what it is—whether it's wanting to be back sitting around the dinner table of your home when you was twelve, and them that was there aren't there now; or whether it's rocking in the cool of the day on the front porch of some old house that got tore down long ago; or whether it's walking along a road you use' to know every fence post of; or fishing from a stream that's dried up or damned these twenty years; or eating spice' currants or pickle' peaches that there aren't none put up like them now; or hearing a voice in a glee club that don't sing no more, or milking a dead cow that wasn't dead on the spring mornings you mean about—no, sir, I don't care what one of them all it happens to be, if you know what it is to want to do it again and can't, 'count of death and distance and long-ago-ness, then I tell you you know one of the lonesomest, hurtingest feelings the human heart can, sole outside of the awful things. And that was what had got the matter with me awhile ago.