When you are twenty you do not patronize sunsets unless you are unhappy,
in love, or both. Tessie Golden was both. Six months ago a sunset that
Belasco himself could not have improved upon had wrung from her only a
casual tribute such as: "My! Look how red the sky is!" delivered as
unemotionally as a weather bulletin.
Tessie Golden sat on the top step of the back porch now, a slim, inert
heap in a cotton kimono whose colour and design were libels on the
Nipponese. Her head was propped wearily against the porch post. Her
hands were limp in her lap. Her face was turned toward the west, where
shone that mingling of orange and rose known as salmon pink. But no
answering radiance in the girl's face met the glow in the Wisconsin sky.
* * * * *
Saturday night, after supper in Chippewa, Wis., Tessie Golden of the
pre-sunset era would have been calling from her bedroom to the kitchen:
"Ma, what'd you do with my pink georgette waist?"
And from the kitchen: "It's in your second bureau drawer. The collar was
kind of mussed from Wednesday night, and I give it a little pressing
while my iron was on."
At seven-thirty Tessie would have emerged from her bedroom in the pink
georgette blouse that might have been considered alarmingly frank as to
texture and precariously V-cut as to neck had Tessie herself not been so
reassuringly unopulent; a black taffeta skirt, lavishly shirred and very
brief; white kid shoes, high-laced, whose height still failed to achieve
the two inches of white silk stocking that linked skirt hem to shoe top;
finally, a hat with a good deal of French blue about it.
As she passed through the sitting room on her way out her mother would
appear in the doorway, dish towel in hand. Her pride in this slim young
thing and her love of her she concealed with a thin layer of carping
criticism.
"Runnin' downtown again, I s'pose." A keen eye on the swishing skirt
hem.
Tessie, the quick-tongued, would pat the arabesque of shining hair that
lay coiled so submissively against either glowing cheek. "Oh, my, no! I
just thought I'd dress up in case Angie Hatton drove past in her auto
and picked me up for a little ride. So's not to keep her waiting."
Angie Hatton was Old Man Hatton's daughter. Any one in the Fox River
Valley could have told you who Old Man Hatton was. You saw his name at
the top of every letterhead of any importance in Chippewa, from the Pulp
and Paper Mill to the First National Bank, and including the watch
factory, the canning works, and the Mid-Western Land Company. Knowing
this, you were able to appreciate Tessie's sarcasm. Angie Hatton was as
unaware of Tessie's existence as only a young woman could be whose
family residence was in Chippewa, Wis., but who wintered in Italy,
summered in the mountains, and bought (so the town said) her very
hairpins in New York. When Angie Hatton came home from the East the town
used to stroll past on Mondays to view the washing on the Hatton line.
Angie's underwear, flirting so audaciously with the sunshine and
zephyrs, was of voile and silk and crêpe de Chine and satin--materials
that we had always thought of heretofore as intended exclusively for
party dresses and wedding gowns. Of course two years later they were
showing practically the same thing at Megan's dry-goods store. But that
was always the way with Angie Hatton. Even those of us who went to
Chicago to shop never quite caught up with her.
Delivered of this ironic thrust, Tessie would walk toward the screen
door with a little flaunting sway of the hips. Her mother's eyes,
following the slim figure, had a sort of grudging love in them. A spare,
caustic, wiry little woman, Tessie's mother. Tessie resembled her as a
water colour may resemble a blurred charcoal sketch. Tessie's wide mouth
curved into humour lines. She was the cut-up of the escapement
department at the watch factory; the older woman's lips sagged at the
corners. Tessie was buoyant and colourful with youth. The other was
shrunken and faded with years and labour. As the girl minced across the
room in her absurdly high-heeled white kid shoes the older woman
thought: "My, but she's pretty!" But she said aloud: "Them shoes could
stand a cleaning. I should think you'd stay home once in a while and not
be runnin' the streets every night."
"Time enough to be sittin' home when I'm old like you."
And yet between these two there was love, and even understanding. But in
families such as Tessie's demonstration is a thing to be ashamed of;
affection a thing to conceal. Tessie's father was janitor of the
Chippewa High School. A powerful man, slightly crippled by rheumatism,
loquacious, lively, fond of his family, proud of his neat gray frame
house, and his new cement sidewalk, and his carefully tended yard and
garden patch. In all her life Tessie had never seen a caress exchanged
between her parents.
Nowadays Ma Golden had little occasion for finding fault with Tessie's
evening diversion. She no longer had cause to say: "Always gaddin'
downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere, like you didn't have a home to
stay in. You ain't been in a evening this week, 'cept when you washed
your hair."
Tessie had developed a fondness for sunsets viewed from the back
porch--she who had thought nothing of dancing until three and rising at
half-past six to go to work.
Stepping about in the kitchen after supper, her mother would eye the
limp, relaxed figure on the back porch with a little pang at her heart.
She would come to the screen door, or even out to the porch on some
errand or other--to empty the coffee grounds; to turn the row of
half-ripe tomatoes reddening on the porch railing; to flap and hang up a
damp tea towel.
"Ain't you goin' out, Tess?"
"No."
"What you want to lop around here for? Such a grand evening. Why don't
you put on your things and run downtown, or over to Cora's or somewhere,
h'm?"
"What for?"--listlessly.
"What for! What does anybody go out for!"
"I don't know."
If they could have talked it over together, these two, the girl might
have found relief. But the family shyness of their class was too strong
upon them. Once Mrs. Golden had said, in an effort at sympathy:
"Person'd think Chuck Mory was the only one who'd gone to war an' the
last fella left in the world."
A grim flash of the old humour lifted the corners of the wide mouth. "He
is. Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing? Or maybe
Fatty Weiman, driving the hack. Guess I'll doll up this evening and see
if I can't make a hit with one of them."
She relapsed into bitter silence. The bottom had dropped out of Tessie
Golden's world.
* * * * *
In order to understand the Tessie of to-day you will have to know the
Tessie of six months ago; Tessie the impudent, the life-loving, the
pleasureful. Tessie Golden could say things to the escapement-room
foreman that any one else would have been fired for. Her wide mouth was
capable of glorious insolences. Whenever you heard shrieks of laughter
from the girls' wash room at noon you knew that Tessie was holding forth
to an admiring group. She was a born mimic; audacious, agile, and with
the gift of burlesque. The autumn that Angie Hatton came home from
Europe wearing the first hobble skirt that Chippewa had ever seen Tessie
gave an imitation of that advanced young woman's progress down Grand
Avenue in this restricted garment. The thing was cruel in its fidelity,
though containing just enough exaggeration to make it artistic. She
followed it up by imitating the stricken look on the face of Mattie
Haynes, cloak and suit buyer at Megan's, who, having just returned from
the East with what she considered the most fashionable of the new fall
styles, now beheld Angie Hatton in the garb that was the last echo of
the last cry in Paris modes--and no model in Mattie's newly selected
stock bore even the remotest resemblance to it.
You would know from this that Tessie was not a particularly deft worker.
Her big-knuckled fingers were cleverer at turning out a shirt waist or
retrimming a hat. Hers were what are known as handy hands, but not
sensitive. It takes a light and facile set of fingers to fit pallet and
arbour and fork together: close work and tedious. Seated on low benches
along the tables, their chins almost level with the table top, the girls
worked with pincers and gas flame, screwing together the three tiny
parts of the watch's anatomy that was their particular specialty. Each
wore a jeweller's glass in one eye. Tessie had worked at the watch
factory for three years, and the pressure of the glass on the eye socket
had given her the slightly hollow-eyed appearance peculiar to
experienced watchmakers. It was not unbecoming, though, and lent her,
somehow, a spiritual look which made her diablerie all the more piquant.
Tessie wasn't always witty, really. But she had achieved a reputation
for wit which insured applause for even her feebler efforts. Nap Ballou,
the foreman, never left the escapement room without a little shiver of
nervous apprehension--a feeling justified by the ripple of suppressed
laughter that went up and down the long tables. He knew that Tessie
Golden, like a naughty schoolgirl when teacher's back is turned, had
directed one of her sure shafts at him.
Ballou, his face darkling, could easily have punished her. Tessie knew
it. But he never did, or would. She knew that, too. Her very insolence
and audacity saved her.
"Some day," Ballou would warn her, "you'll get too gay, and then you'll
find yourself looking for a job."
"Go on--fire me," retorted Tessie, "and I'll meet you in Lancaster"--a
form of wit appreciated only by watchmakers. For there is a certain type
of watch hand who is as peripatetic as the old-time printer. Restless,
ne'er-do-well, spendthrift, he wanders from factory to factory through
the chain of watchmaking towns: Springfield, Trenton, Waltham,
Lancaster, Waterbury, Chippewa. Usually expert, always unreliable,
certainly fond of drink, Nap Ballou was typical of his kind. The steady
worker had a mingled admiration and contempt for him. He, in turn,
regarded the other as a stick-in-the-mud. Nap wore his cap on one side
of his curly head, and drank so evenly and steadily as never to be quite
drunk and never strictly sober. He had slender, sensitive fingers like
an artist's or a woman's, and he knew the parts of that intricate
mechanism known as a watch from the jewel to the finishing room. It was
said he had a wife or two. Forty-six, good-looking in a dissolute sort
of way, possessing the charm of the wanderer, generous with his money,
it was known that Tessie's barbs were permitted to prick him without
retaliation because Tessie herself appealed to his errant fancy.
When the other girls teased her about this obvious state of affairs
something fine and contemptuous welled up in her. "Him! Why, say, he
ought to work in a pickle factory instead of a watch works. All he needs
is a little dill and a handful of grape leaves to make him good eatin'
as a relish."
And she thought of Chuck Mory, perched on the high seat of the American
Express wagon, hatless, sunburnt, stockily muscular, shouting to his
horse as he galloped clattering down Winnebago Street on his way to the
depot and the 7:50 train.
I suppose there was something about the clear simplicity and uprightness
of the firm little figure that appealed to Nap Ballou. He used to regard
her curiously with a long, hard gaze before which she would grow
uncomfortable. "Think you'll know me next time you see me?" But there
was an uneasy feeling beneath her flip exterior. Not that there was
anything of the beautiful, persecuted factory girl and villainous
foreman about the situation. Tessie worked at watchmaking because it was
light, pleasant, and well paid. She could have found another job for the
asking. Her money went for white shoes and pink blouses and lacy boudoir
caps which she affected Sunday mornings. She was forever buying a vivid
necktie for her father and dressing up her protesting mother in gay
colours that went ill with the drab, wrinkled face. "If it wasn't for
me, you'd go round looking like one of those Polack women down by the
tracks," Tessie would scold. "It's a wonder you don't wear a shawl!"
That was the Tessie of six months ago, gay, care-free, holding the reins
of her life in her own two capable hands. Three nights a week, and
Sunday, she saw Chuck Mory. When she went downtown on Saturday night it
was frankly to meet Chuck, who was waiting for her on Schroeder's
drug-store corner. He knew it, and she knew it. Yet they always went
through a little ceremony. She and Cora, turning into Grand from
Winnebago Street, would make for the post office. Then down the length
of Grand with a leaping glance at Schroeder's corner before they reached
it. Yes, there they were, very clean-shaven, clean-shirted, slick
looking. Tessie would have known Chuck's blond head among a thousand. An
air of studied hauteur and indifference as they approached the corner.
Heads turned the other way. A low whistle from the boys.
"Oh, how do!"
"Good evening!"
Both greetings done with careful surprise. Then on down the street. On
the way back you took the inside of the walk, and your hauteur was now
stony to the point of insult. Schroeder's corner simply did not exist.
On as far as Megan's which you entered and inspected, up one brightly
lighted aisle and down the next. At the dress-goods counter there was a
neat little stack of pamphlets entitled "In the World of Fashion." You
took one and sauntered out leisurely. Down Winnebago Street now,
homeward bound, talking animatedly and seemingly unconscious of quick
footsteps sounding nearer and nearer. Just past the Burke House, where
the residential district began, and where the trees cast their kindly
shadows: "Can I see you home?" A hand slipped through her arm; a little
tingling thrill.
"Oh, why, how do, Chuck! Hello, Scotty. Sure, if you're going our way."
At every turn Chuck left her side and dashed around behind her in order
to place himself at her right again, according to the rigid rule of
Chippewa etiquette. He took her arm only at street crossings until they
reached the tracks, which perilous spot seemed to justify him in
retaining his hold throughout the remainder of the stroll. Usually they
lost Cora and Scotty without having been conscious of their loss.
Their talk? The girls and boys that each knew; the day's happenings at
factory and express office; next Wednesday night's dance up in the
Chute; and always the possibility of Chuck's leaving the wagon and
assuming the managership of the office.
"Don't let this go any further, see? But I heard it straight that old
Benke is goin' to be transferred to Fond du Lac. And if he is, why, I
step in, see? Benke's got a girl in Fondy, and he's been pluggin' to get
there. Gee, maybe I won't be glad when he does!" A little silence. "Will
you be glad, Tess? H'm?"
Tess felt herself glowing and shivering as the big hand closed more
tightly on her arm. "Me? Why, sure I'll be pleased to see you get a job
that's coming to you by rights, and that'll get you better pay, and
all."
But she knew what he meant, and he knew she knew. And the clasp
tightened until it hurt her, and she was glad.
* * * * *
No more of that now. Chuck--gone. Scotty--gone. All the boys at the
watch works, all the fellows in the neighbourhood--gone. At first she
hadn't minded. It was exciting. You kidded them at first: "Well, believe
me, Chuck, if you shoot the way you play ball, you're a gone goose
already."
"All you got to do, Scotty, is to stick that face of yours up over the
top of the trench and the Germans'll die of fright an' save you wastin'
bullets."
There was a great knitting of socks and sweaters and caps. Tessie's
big-knuckled, capable fingers made you dizzy, they flew so fast. Chuck
was outfitted as for a polar expedition. Tess took half a day off to bid
him good-bye. They marched down Grand Avenue, that first lot of them, in
their everyday suits and hats, with their shiny yellow suitcases and
their paste-board boxes in their hands, sheepish, red-faced, awkward. In
their eyes, though, a certain look. And so off for Camp Sherman, their
young heads sticking out of the car windows in clusters--black, yellow,
brown, red. But for each woman on the depot platform there was just one
head. Tessie saw a blurred blond one with a misty halo around it. A
great shouting and waving of handkerchiefs:
"Goo'-bye! Goo'-bye! Write, now! Be sure! Mebbe you can get off in a
week, for a visit. Goo'-bye! Goo--"
They were gone. Their voices came back to the crowd on the depot
platform--high, clear young voices; almost like the voices of children,
shouting.
Well, you wrote letters; fat, bulging letters, and in turn you received
equally plump envelopes with a red triangle in one corner. You sent
boxes of homemade fudge (nut variety) and cookies and the more durable
forms of cake.
Then, unaccountably, Chuck was whisked all the way to California. He was
furious at parting with his mates, and his indignation was expressed in
his letters to Tessie. She sympathized with him in her replies. She
tried to make light of it, but there was a little clutch of terror in
it, too. California! My land! Might as well send a person to the end of
the world while they were about it. Two months of that. Then,
inexplicably again, Chuck's letters bore the astounding postmark of New
York. She thought, in a panic, that he was Franceward bound, but it
turned out not to be so. Not yet. Chuck's letters were taking on a
cosmopolitan tone. "Well," he wrote, "I guess the little old town is as
dead as ever. It seems funny you being right there all this time and
I've travelled from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Everybody treats me
swell. You ought to seen some of those California houses. They make
Hatton's place look sick."
The girls, Cora and Tess and the rest, laughed and joked among
themselves and assured one another, with a toss of the head, that they
could have a good time without the fellas. They didn't need boys around.
Well, I should say not!
They gave parties, and they were not a success. There was one of the
type known as a stag. They dressed up in their brother's clothes, or
their father's or a neighbour boy's, and met at Cora's. They looked as
knock-kneed and slope-shouldered and unmasculine as girls usually do in
men's attire. All except Tessie. There was something so astonishingly
boyish and straight about her; she swaggered about with such a mannish
swing of the leg (that was the actress in her) that the girls flushed a
little and said: "Honest, Tess, if I didn't know you was a girl, I'd be
stuck on you. With that hat on a person wouldn't know you from a boy."
Tessie would cross one slim leg over the other and bestow a knowing wink
upon the speaker. "Some hen party!" they all said. They danced to the
music of the victrola and sang "Over There." They had ice cream and
chocolate layer cake and went home in great hilarity, with their hands
on each other's shoulders, still singing. When they met a passer-by they
giggled and shrieked and ran.
But the thing was a failure, and they knew it. Next day, at the lunch
hour and in the wash room, there was a little desultory talk about the
stag. But the meat of such an aftergathering is contained in phrases
such as "I says t'him" and "He says t'me." They wasted little
conversation on the stag. It was much more exciting to exhibit letters
on blue-lined paper with the red triangle at the top. Chuck's last
letter had contained the news of his sergeancy.
Angie Hatton, home from the East, was writing letters, too. Everyone in
Chippewa knew that. She wrote on that new art paper with the gnawed
looking edges and stiff as a newly laundered cuff. But the letters which
she awaited so eagerly were written on the same sort of paper as were
those Tessie had from Chuck: blue-lined, cheap in quality, a red
triangle at one corner. A New York fellow, Chippewa learned; an aviator.
They knew, too, that young Hatton was an infantry lieutenant somewhere
in the East. These letters were not from him.
Ever since her home-coming Angie had been sewing at the Red Cross shop
on Grand Avenue. Chippewa boasted two Red Cross shops. The Grand Avenue
shop was the society shop. The East-End crowd sewed there, capped,
veiled, aproned--and unapproachable. Were your fingers ever so deft,
your knowledge of seams and basting mathematical, your skill with that
complicated garment known as a pneumonia jacket uncanny; if you did not
belong to the East-End set, you did not sew at the Grand Avenue shop. No
matter how grossly red the blood which the Grand Avenue bandages and
pads were ultimately to stanch, the liquid in the fingers that rolled
and folded them was pure cerulean.
Tessie and her crowd had never thought of giving any such service to
their country. They spoke of the Grand Avenue workers as "that stinkin'
bunch," I regret to say. Yet each one of the girls was capable of
starting a shirt waist in an emergency on Saturday night and finishing
it in time for a Sunday picnic, buttonholes and all. Their help might
have been invaluable. It never was asked.
* * * * *
Without warning Chuck came home on three days' leave. It meant that he
was bound for France right enough this time. But Tessie didn't care.
"I don't care where you're goin'," she said, exultantly, her eyes
lingering on the stocky, straight, powerful figure in its rather
ill-fitting khaki. "You're here now. That's enough. Ain't you tickled to
be home, Chuck? Gee!"
"I sh'd say," responded Chuck. But even he seemed to detect some lack in
his tone and words. He elaborated somewhat shamefacedly: "Sure. It's
swell to be home. But I don't know. After you've travelled around, and
come back, things look so kind of little to you. I don't know--kind
of--" he floundered about at a loss for expression. Then tried again:
"Now, take Hatton's place, f'r example. I always used to think it was a
regular palace, but, gosh, you ought to see places where I was asked in
San Francisco and around there. Why, they was--were--enough to make the
Hatton house look like a shack. Swimmin' pools of white marble, and
acres of yard like a park, and a Jap help always bringin' you something
to eat or drink. And the folks themselves--why, say! Here we are
scrapin' and bowin' to Hattons and that bunch. They're pikers to what
some people are that invited me to their houses in New York and
Berkeley, and treated me and the other guys like kings or something.
Take Megan's store, too"--he was warming to his subject, so that he
failed to notice the darkening of Tessie's face--"it's a joke compared
to New York and San Francisco stores. Reg'lar rube joint."
Tessie stiffened. Her teeth were set, her eyes sparkled. She tossed her
head. "Well, I'm sure, Mr. Mory, it's good enough for me. Too bad you
had to come home at all now you're so elegant and swell, and everything.
You better go call on Angie Hatton instead of wastin' time on me. She'd
probably be tickled to see you."
He stumbled to his feet, then, awkwardly. "Aw, say, Tessie, I didn't
mean--why, say--you don't suppose--why, believe me, I pretty near busted
out cryin' when I saw the Junction eatin' house when my train came in.
And I been thinkin' of you every minute. There wasn't a day--"
"Tell that to your swell New York friends. I may be a rube, but I ain't
a fool." She was perilously near to tears.
"Why, say, Tess, listen! Listen! If you knew--if you knew--a guy's got
to--he's got no right to--"
And presently Tessie was mollified, but only on the surface. She smiled
and glanced and teased and sparkled. And beneath was terror. He talked
differently. He walked differently. It wasn't his clothes or the army.
It was something else--an ease of manner, a new leisureliness of glance,
an air. Once Tessie had gone to Milwaukee over Labour Day. It was the
extent of her experience as a traveller. She remembered how superior she
had felt for at least two days after. But Chuck! California! New York!
It wasn't the distance that terrified her. It was his new knowledge, the
broadening of his vision, though she did not know it and certainly could
not have put it into words.
They went walking down by the river to Oneida Springs, and drank some of
the sulphur water that tasted like rotten eggs. Tessie drank it with
little shrieks and shudders and puckered her face up into an expression
indicative of extreme disgust.
"It's good for you," Chuck said, and drank three cups of it, manfully.
"That taste is the mineral qualities the water contains--sulphur and
iron and so forth."
"I don't care," snapped Tessie, irritably. "I hate it!" They had often
walked along the river and tasted of the spring water, but Chuck had
never before waxed scientific. They took a boat at Baumann's boathouse
and drifted down the lovely Fox River.
"Want to row?" Chuck asked. "I'll get an extra pair of oars if you do."
"I don't know how. Besides, it's too much work. I guess I'll let you do
it."
Chuck was fitting his oars in the oarlocks. She stood on the landing
looking down at him. His hat was off. His hair seemed blonder than ever
against the rich tan of his face. His neck muscles swelled a little as
he bent. Tessie felt a great longing to bury her face in the warm red
skin. He straightened with a sigh and smiled at her. "I'll be ready in a
minute." He took off his coat and turned his khaki shirt in at the
throat, so that you saw the white, clean line of his untanned chest in
strange contrast to his sunburnt throat. A feeling of giddy faintness
surged over Tessie. She stepped blindly into the boat and would have
fallen if Chuck's hard, firm grip had not steadied her. "Whoa, there!
Don't you know how to step into a boat? There. Walk along the middle."
She sat down and smiled up at him. "I don't know how I come to do that.
I never did before."
Chuck braced his feet, rolled up his sleeves, and took an oar in each
brown hand, bending rhythmically to his task. He looked about him, then
at the girl, and drew a deep breath, feathering his oars. "I guess I
must have dreamed about this more'n a million times."
"Have you, Chuck?"
They drifted on in silence. "Say, Tess, you ought to learn to row. It's
good exercise. Those girls in California and New York, they play
baseball and row and swim as good as the boys. Honest, some of 'em are
wonders!"
"Oh, I'm sick of your swell New York friends! Can't you talk about
something else?"
He saw that he had blundered without in the least understanding how or
why. "All right. What'll we talk about?" In itself a fatal admission.
"About--you." Tessie made it a caress.
"Me? Nothin' to tell about me. I just been drillin' and studyin' and
marchin' and readin' some--Oh, say, what d'you think?"
"What?"
"They been learnin' us--teachin' us, I mean--French. It's the darnedest
language! Bread is pain. Can you beat that? If you want to ask for a
piece of bread, you say like this: _Donnay ma un morso doo pang_. See?"
"My!" breathed Tessie, all admiration.
And within her something was screaming: "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! He
knows French. And those girls that can row and everything. And me, I
don't know anything. Oh, God, what'll I do?"
It was as though she could see him slipping away from her, out of her
grasp, out of her sight. She had no fear of what might come to him in
France. Bullets and bayonets would never hurt Chuck. He'd make it, just
as he always made the 7.50 when it seemed as if he was going to miss it
sure. He'd make it there and back, all right. But he--he'd be a
different Chuck, while she stayed the same Tessie. Books, travel,
French, girls, swell folks--
And all the while she was smiling and dimpling and trailing her hand in
the water. "Bet you can't guess what I got in that lunch box."
"Chocolate cake."
"Well, of course I've got chocolate cake. I baked it myself this
morning."
"Yes, you did!"
"Why, Chuck Mory, I did so! I guess you think I can't do anything, the
way you talk."
"Oh, don't I! I guess you know what I think."
"Well, it isn't the cake I mean. It's something else."
"Fried chicken!"
"Oh, now you've gone and guessed it." She pouted prettily.
"You asked me to, didn't you?"
Then they laughed together, as at something exquisitely witty.
Down the river, drifting, rowing. Tessie pointed to a house half hidden
among the trees on the farther shore: "There's Hatton's camp. They say
they have grand times there with their swell crowd some Saturdays and
Sundays. If I had a house like that, I'd live in it all the time, not
just a couple of days out of the whole year." She hesitated a moment. "I
suppose it looks like a shanty to you now."