The half-mile walk from and to Brookhollow twice a day was keeping her
from rapid physical degeneration. Yet, like all northern American
summers, the weather became fearfully hot in July and August, and the
half-mile even in early morning and at six in the evening left her
listless, nervously dreading the great concrete-lined room, the reek
of glue and oil, the sweaty propinquity of her neighbours, and the
monotonous appetite of the sprawling machine which she fed all day
long with pasteboard squares.
She went to her work in early morning, bareheaded, in a limp pink
dress very much open at the throat, which happened to be the merciful
mode of the moment--a slender, sweet-lipped thing, beginning to move
with grace now--and her chestnut hair burned gold-pale by the sun.
* * * * *
There came that movable holiday in August, when the annual shutdown
for repairs closed the mill and box factory during forty-eight
hours--a matter of prescribing oil and new bearings for the overfed
machines so that their digestions should remain unimpaired and their
dispositions amiable.
It was a hot August morning, intensely blue and still, with that slow,
subtle concentration of suspended power in the sky, ominous of thunder
brooding somewhere beyond the western edges of the world.
Ruhannah aided her mother with the housework, picked peas and a squash
and a saucer full of yellow pansies in the weedy little garden, and,
at noon, dined on the trophies of her husbandry, physically and
æsthetically.
After dinner, dishes washed and room tidied, she sat down on the
narrow, woodbine-infested verandah with pencil and paper, and
attempted to draw the stone bridge and the little river where it
spread in deeps and shallows above the broken dam.
Perspective was unknown to her; of classic composition she was also
serenely ignorant, so the absence of these in her picture did not
annoy her. On the contrary, there was something hideously modern and
recessional in her vigorous endeavour to include in her drawing
everything her grey eyes chanced to rest on. She even arose and gently
urged a cow into the already overcrowded composition, and, having
accomplished its portrait with Cezanne-like fidelity, was beginning to
look about for Adoniram to include him also, when her mother called to
her, holding out a pair of old gloves.
"Dear, we are going to save a little money this year. Do you think you
could catch a few fish for supper?"
The girl nodded, took the gloves, laid aside her pencil and paper,
picked up the long bamboo pole from the verandah floor, and walked
slowly out into the garden.
A trowel was sticking in the dry earth near the flower bed, where
poppies, and pansies, and petunias, and phlox bordered the walk.