“ ‘Home of youth! all thy pleasures
Are impressed on my heart—
Ere they fade from my mem’ry
Life itself must depart—’ ”
“ ’S Maggie! ’S Maggie!”
“I told Lossie to yell up when it was lunch time, but it can’t be yet. What is it, Lossie?”
“Dey aint nothin’ fo’ lunch, scusin’ some pohk chops Ah give Jake.”
“I guess fried tomatoes’ll have to do. I’ll run out and get some, and you be looking through this trimming box, Lily—there’s a lot that’s not worth moving that Lossie’d love to have—those jet buckles are kind of pretty, though.”
Coming in from the truck patch with the tomatoes, she saw a butterfly that had lighted on the bricks by the kitchen steps and was slowly opening and closing its quivering wings, blue in the sunshine, black in shadow. She stood gazing at it, lost.
“Goodness! I haven’t any time to stand looking at butterflies!”
But what did it make her think of? What was it? And then she was back through the years, back under the pear tree with Edward, watching another butterfly. The tomatoes fell to the ground and burst.
After all it was a relief when they were finally in the new house. It was a plain little place, and they couldn’t see the river; but there was a sunny bay-window for Maggie’s geraniums, and the card dish was full of calling-cards, with the grandest surreptitiously put on top by Lily. And just having a clean empty kitchen to go into was luxury. To know there wouldn’t be a slimy mass of tea-leaves and orange seeds and bits of string to be picked out of the sink drain, or a tipped-over bottle of sticky black “tonic” oozing among the tea-towels: to be able to relax from the mental pushing and shoving at the dark sisters of that long procession that strolled through the kitchen of The Maples while the Campions were keeping boarders.
The Maples was being remodelled. Maggie never went on that bit of road, but people told her about it.
It wouldn’t have been as hard if the Spears hadn’t been making the place so much more beautiful. The new walled garden; the long-spurred columbine from England; the tea-roses with their melting colors of sunsets and peaches and cream; the little lead boys holding a sundial on their heads, far older than the great trees that feathered the sky above the house; Mrs. Spear’s tool-house like a little stone house in the woods in a German fairy tale, with all the tools Maggie had always wanted, with their handles painted moss-green, and the shelter-seat under the pear trees, whose petals fell on butler and footman spreading the lace cloth, bringing out silver tea-things and plates of paper-thin bread and butter or hot crumpets melting with butter and tenderness. It would have been easier to bear, if the Spears had gone in for peanut brittle stone walls and round beds of cannas, like Mrs. Detweiler.
Mrs. Spear was always sweet about giving the Campions the credit when people praised her garden, but to her friends she said:
“Well, of course, my dear, it was a sweet old place; but really and truly, the condition it was in—! Did you ever see it before we bought it?”
No matter what changes they made, Maggie thought, she could keep The Maples unchanged in her heart. When her home had been hers, she had never been able to hold it—the leaves fell, sunsets faded, darkness drank up the river, everything changed and passed like flowing water. But now that she had lost it it was hers forever, immortal.
Lily wanted dreadfully to go to the housewarming the Spears gave, when all the changes had been made. “It would hurt their feelings so if none of us came,” she thought. And she did want to see what they had done to the house, and then there were sure to be wonderful refreshments. Of course, if she went she wouldn’t mention it to Maggie, who would rather die than go, she knew, and who couldn’t stand the Spears just because they had bought The Maples.
“If I go—” Lily said to herself, up to the time when she put on her hat and her new dotted veil—goodness, how stiff and scratchy! And then with her heart thumping she crept downstairs and out of doors, while Maggie, with her head tied up in a dustcloth and her mouth full of tacks, was covering the old schoolroom sofa with a pair of the parlor curtains, too busy to notice what anyone else was doing.
They had taken away the fountain with its iron calla-lilies—how queer! All it needed was a little paint, and one broken lily fixed. But there was another fountain, a new one, in the garden, white against the hemlock hedge, a slender column splintering into rainbows, veiling itself in thin crystal.
Sunlight drenched through the trees, the red tulips were sun-filled cups—Holy Grails at a garden party. She had a new hat, bought secretly in Wilmington. “It’s my own money!” she told herself, but she knew she ought to save it for the dentist. It was a sort of peach-basket, only it had grapes on it instead of peaches. She had tried on almost every hat in the shop before she found it, and her mild deliberation nearly drove the shopgirl mad. “You’ve got to remember you have a stout face, dear,” she said, plunging hat after hat on Lily’s head, bending down an ear. “That’s why you don’t think they look good on you, but the hats themselves are really lovely; I wouldn’t tell you so if they weren’t.” But Lily loved this one—white grapes that looked good enough to eat. Their light tapping cheered her now, she put up her hand from time to time to feel them. But even with the new hat, even though she had enlivened her old brown silk dress with pectoral fins of brown chiffon, and cleaned her white gloves, among the other women in their frilly flower-colored organdies and muslins,
