a housekeeper, a Mrs. Watson, and she looks both
capable and practical. Notwithstanding the fact that she seems to have
stepped right out of Dickens, and carries a huge Manx cat about with
her, Percy said he thought they'd muddle along in some way. Thoughtful
boy that he was, he brought me a portmanteau packed full of the newer
novels and magazines, and a two-pound jar of smoking tobacco for
Dinky-Dunk.

_Thursday the Ninth_

A Belasco couldn't have more carefully stage-managed the first meeting
between Percy and Olga. I felt that she was my discovery, and I wanted
to spring her on him, at the right moment, and in the right way. I
wanted to get the Valkyr on a cloud effect. So I kept Percy in the house
on the pretext of giving him a cup of tea, until I should hear the
rumble of the wagon and know that Olga was swinging home with her team.
It so happened, when I heard the first faint far thunder of that homing
wagon, that Percy was sitting in my easy chair, with a cup of my
thinnest china in one hand and a copy of Walter Pater's _Marius the
Epicurean_ in the other. We had been speaking of climate, and he wanted
to look up the passage where Pater said, "one always dies of the
cold"--which I consider a slur on the Northwest!

I couldn't help realizing, as I sat staring at Percy, at the thin,
over-sensitive face, and the high-arched, over-refined nose, and the
narrow, stooping, over-delicate shoulders, what a direct opposite he was
to Olga, in every way. Instead of thin china and Pater in her hand at
that very moment, I remembered she'd probably have a four-tined fork or
a mud-stained fence stretcher.

I went to the door and looked out. At the proper moment I called Percy.
Olga was standing up in the wagon-box, swinging about one corner of the
corral. She stood with her shoulders well back, for her weight was
already on the lines, to pull the team up. Her loose blue skirt edge was
fluttering in the wind, but at the front was held tight against her
legs, like the drapery of the Peace figure in the Sherman statue in the
Plaza. Across that Artemis-like bosom her thin waist was stretched
tight. She had no hat on, and her pale gold hair, which had been braided
and twisted up into a heavy crown, had the sheen of metal on it, in the
later afternoon sun. And in that clear glow of light, which so often
plays mirage-like tricks with vision, she loomed up like a demi-god, or
a she-Mercury who ought to have had little bicyc