f the country
around here. We could get up a picnic party, ten or a dozen of us,
and go up on Bald Knob and see the scenery and have a real jolly
time. And I'd be glad to take you down to Lesterhampton--there's a
real old-fashioned inn down there, they say, where Paul Revere stayed
one time; they say you can get the best kind of fried chicken and
corn on cob and real old-fashioned New England blueberry pie. Would
you like to?"

"Why, I should be very pleased to," said Una.

Sec. 2

Mr. Schwirtz seemed to know everybody at the farm. He had been there
only thirty-six hours, but already he called Mr. Cannon "Sam," and knew
that Miss Vincent's married sister's youngest child had recently passed
away with a severe and quite unexpected attack of cholera morbus. Mr.
Schwirtz introduced Una to the others so fulsomely that she was
immediately taken into the inner political ring. He gave her a first
lesson in auction pinochle also. They had music and recitations at ten,
and Una's shyness was so warmed away that she found herself reciting,
"I'm Only Mammy's Pickaninny Coon."

She went candle-lighted up to a four-poster bed. As she lay awake, her
job-branded mind could not keep entirely away from the office, the work
she would have to do when she returned, the familiar series of
indefinite worries and disconnected office pictures. But mostly she let
the rustle of the breathing land inspirit her while she thought of Mr.
Julius Edward Schwirtz.

She knew that he was ungrammatical, but she denied that he was uncouth.
His deep voice had been very kindly; his clipped mustache was trim; his
nails, which had been ragged at that commercial-college lunch, were
manicured now; he was sure of himself, while Walter Babson doubted and
thrashed about. All of which meant that the tired office-woman was
touchily defensive of the man who liked her.

She couldn't remember just where she had learned it, but she knew that
Mr. Schwirtz was a widower.

Sec. 3

The fact that she did not have to get up and go to the office was Una's
chief impression at awakening, but she was not entirely obtuse to the
morning, to the chirp of a robin, the cluck of the hens, the creak of a
hay-wagon, and the sweet smell of cattle. When she arose she looked
down a slope of fields so far away that they seemed smooth as a lawn.
Solitary, majestic trees cast long shadows over a hilly pasture of crisp
grass worn to inviting paths by the cropping cattle. Beyond the