The injustice of letting the burden fall to Serena did not trouble me. She had a family to save, I had none. With her it was duty; with me it was an interruption of duty. But if my reasoning _was_ fallacious, if my aim was besmirched with selfishness, if my intended liberality as to prices was only the bare gesture of reciprocity, I was ready to say, so be it. I was under the spell of that most alluring of hopes, the hope of combining the simplicities of nature, the abandon of the wilderness, the austere ecstasy of solitude, with the flowing market of the city voluptuary. And so there was a bountiful garden at Len’s. It required tact amounting to technic to get all of the family help necessary in its preparation, and when finally it shot up with its promise of abundance, I felt that I had perspiringly insinuated it into and out of the ground. However, there it was, and the summer passed, leaving us affluent with the plunder we had wrung from it. But happiness had fled the mountain. Slowly, reluctantly, in my contact with the family, I became aware of the desertion--even felt it in my own denuded days. Formerly I had accepted Serena’s occasional help, knowing so well that I was not withdrawing her from imperative tasks at home. Now that was changed, and with a vengeance that demanded more than a reversal of favors. My time was never my own, calculated and indubitable. Daily it became more difficult to comfort myself with thoughts of “next year” when Serena’s reformation would be thorough and her work so adjusted that she at least would have time to run over to my cabin and remove the ashes from my big fireplace. I could never take out those relentlessly accumulating ashes without a protest to the stony gods; while Serena had often declared that she enjoyed doing it. “It makes the place look so clean and purty,” she would say, and go at the work with the heart of an artist. My thoughts began to linger tenderly on the days that were gone, days adorned with a dilatory, unprovident, laughter-loving Serena, who could always find time to take out my ashes.