"She doesn't know anything about sewing, and she hasn't any patterns,
and I am to go up every day, and William Watters will come for me with
his mule--"
Then I cried about her a little, because it seemed so dreadful that she
should be there all alone, without any one to sustain her and cherish
her as Billy did me.
"Oh, Billy, Billy," I said to him, "I'd rather live over a grocery store
with you than live in a palace with anybody else--"
And Billy said, "Don't cry, lady love, you are not going to live with
anybody else."
And he put his arm around me, and as we walked along together in the
April night it was like the days when we had been young lovers, only our
joy in each other was deeper and finer, for then we had only guessed at
happiness, and now we knew--
Well, I went up every day. William Watters came for me, and I carried my
patterns and we sat in the big west room, and right under the window a
pair of robins were building a nest.
We watched them as they worked, and it seemed to us that no matter how
hard we toiled those two birds kept ahead. "I never dreamed," Lady
Crusoe remarked one morning, "that they were at it all the time like
this."
"You wait until they begin to feed their young," I told her. "People
talk about being as free as a bird. But I can tell you that they slave
from dawn until dark. I have seen a mother bird at dusk giving a last
bite to one squalling baby while the father fed another."
Lady Crusoe laid down her work and looked out over the hills. "The
father," she said, and that was all for a long time, and we stitched and
stitched, but at last she spoke straight from her thoughts: "How dear
your husband is to you!"
"That's what husbands are made for."
"Some of them are not, dear," her voice was hard, "some of them expect
so much and give so little--"
I kept still and presently she began again. "They give money--and they
think that is--enough. They give jewels--and think we ought to be
profoundly grateful."
"Well, my experience," I told her, "is that the men give as much love as
the women--"