"Well, it don't make any difference to me what you are. And as long as you can manage me," he added, "you needn't worry about not keeping your hand in." "It's for your own good anyway," she retorted. "You're too easy-going with everybody." "I know it, honey. I ain't complaining." He was refilling his pipe from his shabby old pouch of tobacco, and while he prodded the bowl with his thumb, he lifted his eyes and looked at her with his sheepish smile. "I heard 'em talking about Jason Greylock yesterday at the store," he said. She made a gesture of aversion. "What did they say?" "Not much that I can recollect. Only that he is too lazy to come for his mail. He has buried himself in that house in the woods across Whippernock River, and he sometimes lets a whole month go by without coming to the post office." "Perhaps he hasn't any way of getting over." "He's still got his horse and buggy. I doubt if he's really as poor as he makes out. He hires Aunt Mehaley Plumtree to cook for him and look after the poultry. She comes every morning and stays till dark." "To think of coming down to that after Five Oaks!" "Well, the country goes against you when you ain't cut out for a farmer. Since the old man brought him back from the North, I reckon Jason has had a hard row to hoe." "He wasn't obliged to stay here," she observed scornfully. "No, but he was always too easy-going. A pleasant enough fellow when he was a boy; but soon ripe, soon rotten." "Oh, I give it up." Dorinda was untying her apron while she answered. "He isn't worth all the time we've wasted talking about him." "Good Lord, Dorinda! You haven't been sitting here ten minutes." "Well, ten minutes will pick a bushel, as Ebenezer says. They are waiting for me over at Five Oaks." This was the secret of her contentment, she knew, breathless activity. If she was satisfied with her life, it was only because she never stopped long enough in her work to imagine the kind of life she should have preferred. While her health was good and her energy unimpaired, she had no time for discontent. If she had looked for it, she sometimes told herself, she could have found sufficient cause for unhappiness; but she was careful not to look for it. In these years there were brief periods when her old dreams awakened. Beauty that seemed too fugitive to be real was still more a torment than a delight to her. The moon rising over the harp-shaped pine; the shocked corn against the red sunsets of autumn; the mulberry-coloured twilights of winter;--while she watched these things the past would glow again with the fitful incandescence of memory. But the inner warmth died with the external beauty, and she dismissed the longing as weakness. "You know where that sort of thing leads you," she would tell herself sternly. "Three months of love, and you pay for it with all the rest of your life."