Leaf and bud and blossom
conversed with him in the old vocabulary of his careless youth--the
inanimate things, the familiar stones and rails, the gates and
furrows and roofs and turns of the road had an eloquence, too, and a
power in the transformation. The country had smiled and he had felt
the breath of it, and his heart was drawn as if in a moment back to
his old love. The city was far away.
This rural atavism, then, seized Robert Walmsley and possessed him. A
queer thing he noticed in connection with it was that Alicia, sitting
at his side, suddenly seemed to him a stranger. She did not belong
to this recurrent phase. Never before had she seemed so remote, so
colorless and high--so intangible and unreal. And yet he had never
admired her more than when she sat there by him in the rickety spring
wagon, chiming no more with his mood and with her environment than
the Matterhorn chimes with a peasant's cabbage garden.
That night when the greetings and the supper were over, the entire
family, including Buff, the yellow dog, bestrewed itself upon the
front porch. Alicia, not haughty but silent, sat in the shadow
dressed in an exquisite pale-gray tea gown. Robert's mother
discoursed to her happily concerning marmalade and lumbago. Tom sat
on the top step; Sisters Millie and Pam on the lowest step to catch
the lightning bugs. Mother had the willow rocker. Father sat in the
big armchair with one of its arms gone. Buff sprawled in the middle
of the porch in everybody's way.
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