Instead of acting tickled to death, as I figured she would, she just looked kind of funny and said she hoped I had as good taste in houses as I had in clothes. She tried to make me describe the house and the furniture to her, but I wouldn’t do it. To appreciate a layout like that, you have to see it for yourself.
We were married and stopped in Yellowstone for a week on our way here. That was the only really happy week we had together. From the minute we arrived home till she left for good, she was a different woman than the one I thought I knew. She never smiled and several times I caught her crying. She wouldn’t tell me what ailed her and when I asked if she was just homesick, she said no and choked up and cried some more.
You can imagine that things were not as I expected they would be. In New York and in Chicago and Yellowstone, she had had more life than any girl I ever met. Now she acted all the while as if she were playing the title role at a funeral.
One night late in May the telephone rang. It was Mrs. Dwan and she wanted Florence. If I had known what this was going to mean, I would have slapped the receiver back on the hook and let her keep on wanting.
I had met Dwan a couple of times and had heard about their place out on the Turnpike. But I had never seen it or his wife either.
Well, it developed that Mildred Dwan had gone to school with Florence and Marjorie Paxton, and she had just learned from Marjorie that Florence was my wife and living here. She said she and her husband would be in town and call on us the next Sunday afternoon.
Florence didn’t seem to like the idea and kind of discouraged it. She said we would drive out and call on them instead. Mrs. Dwan said no, that Florence was the newcomer and it was her (Mrs. Dwan’s) first move. So Florence gave in.
They came and they hadn’t been in the house more than a minute when Florence began to cry. Mrs. Dwan cried, too, and Dwan and I stood there first on one foot and then the other, trying to pretend we didn’t know the girls were crying. Finally, to relieve the tension, I invited him to come and see the rest of the place. I showed him all over and he was quite enthusiastic. When we returned to the living-room, the girls had dried their eyes and were back in school together.
Florence accepted an invitation for one-o’clock dinner a week from that day. I told her, after they had left, that I would go along only on condition that she and our hostess would both control their tear-ducts. I was so accustomed to solo sobbing that I didn’t mind it anymore, but I couldn’t stand a duet of it either in harmony or unison.
Well, when we got out there and had driven down their private lane through the trees and caught a glimpse of their house, which people around town had been talking about as something wonderful, I laughed harder than any time since I was single. It looked just like what it was, a reorganized barn. Florence asked me what was funny, and when I told her, she pulled even a longer face than usual.
“I think it’s beautiful,” she said.
Tie that!
I insisted on her going up the steps alone. I was afraid if the two of us stood on the porch at once, we’d fall through and maybe founder before help came. I warned her not to smack the knocker too hard or the door might crash in and frighten the horses.
“If you make jokes like that in front of the Dwans,” she said, “I’ll never speak to you again.”
“I’d forgotten you ever did,” said I.
I was expecting a hostler to let us in, but Mrs. Dwan came in person.
“Are we late?” said Florence.
“A little,” said Mrs. Dwan, “but so is dinner. Helga didn’t get home from church till half past twelve.”
“I’m glad of it,” said Florence. “I want you to take me all through this beautiful, beautiful house right this minute.”
Mrs. Dwan called her husband and insisted that he stop in the middle of mixing a cocktail so he could join us in a tour of the beautiful, beautiful house.
“You wouldn’t guess it,” said Mrs. Dwan, “but it used to be a barn.”
I was going to say I had guessed it. Florence gave me a look that changed my mind.
“When Jim and I first came here,” said Mrs. Dwan, “we lived in an ugly little rented house on Oliver Street. It was only temporary, of course; we were just waiting till we found what we really wanted. We used to drive around the country Saturday afternoons and Sundays, hoping we would run across the right sort of thing. It was in the late fall when we first saw this place. The leaves were off the trees and it was visible from the Turnpike.
“ ‘Oh, Jim!’ I exclaimed. ‘Look at that simply gorgeous old barn! With those wide shingles! And I’ll bet you it’s got hand-hewn beams in that middle, main section.’ Jim bet me I was wrong, so we left the car, walked up the driveway, found the door open and came brazenly in. I won my bet as you can see.”
She pointed to some dirty old rotten beams that ran across the living-room ceiling and looked as if five or six generations
