ay
since."

"It was sensible of him to go. And it's kind of him to wire." I said
no more about the water.

"Everybody has been kind. And it wasn't duty kindness, either. It
was kind kindness!" said Alicia, lucidly. "Do you know what they're
saying in Hyndsville now? They're saying old Sophronisba played a
joke on herself." She left me to digest that as best I might.

It isn't pleasant to be ill anywhere. But it isn't altogether
unpleasant to be on the sick list in South Carolina. Everybody is
anxious about you. Old ladies with palm-leaf fans in their tireless
hands come and sit with you. They aren't brilliant old ladies, you
understand. I know some whose secular library consists of the
Complete Works of John Esten Cooke, Gilmore Simms's War Poems of the
South, and a thumbed copy of Father Ryan. But add to these the
Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Imitation of Christ, and
it doesn't make such a bad showing. It's astonishing how soothing
the companionship of women fed upon this pabulum can be, when the
things of the world are of necessity set aside for a space, and the
simpler things of the spirit draw near.

Old gentlemen in well-brushed clothes and immaculate, exquisitely
darned linen, call daily with small gifts of fruit and flowers, and
send you messages from which you infer that the sun won't be able to
shine properly until you come outside again. And there isn't a
housekeeper of your acquaintance who hasn't got you on her mind:
there are sent to you steaming bowls of perfect soup, flaky rolls
and golden cake, jeweled jellies, and cool, enticing, trembly things
in glass dishes. And when you can sit up for more than an hour or
two at a time, why, then you know what it really means to have South
Carolina neighbors.

Doctor Geddes made me spend my days in the garden that Schmetz had
labored upon with such loving-kindness, and that in consequence was
become a marvel of bloom and scent. Every butterfly in South
Carolina must have visited that garden. I hadn't known there were
that many butterflies in the world. All the florist-shop windows in
New York, that I had once paused before with envy and longing, were
stinted and poor and pale before the living, out-o'-doors wonder of
it. Florist shops haven't any bees, nor birds, nor butterflies, nor
trees that wave their green branches at you like friendly hands.

A flowering vine festooned the marble Love, and one great scarlet
spray of bloom flamed upon his