She had never thought before that one thing might be the best, superior to all other things, but when her uncle placed the question at once it became clear that among all the betters there must be one supreme best. She was bewildered in her pursuit of some reply, wanting to find the true answer, and she stared at the ground or at the wooden pillar, penetrating the query with the whole of her strength. Her uncle had turned to some other matter, he was talking with Anthony now—the foot-and-mouth disease, Henry Watterson, the tobacco pool in the dark district, Mnemosyne, the secret of the mind, the price of sugar mules, and back to the pool again. The vine that spread over the brick walls of the house made a great plane of flowing green that turned with the turning wall and lapped over the south front and reached to the north gable. It had come from somewhere far away; her attention did not cling to the place as Anthony repeated it with wonder. The main stem of the vine grew on the south side of the house under the window of the room where the aunt and uncle lived, the room across the hall from the parlor, but the longest reach of it, at the farthest end of the west wall, was a hundred feet or more from the root. It was as if it were a great tree, flattened and attenuated to a vine and bent about a house, and her grandfather and uncle were two children in their simple delight in the great growth. Doe had brought it from some place far away a long while ago. From Virginia. She had come back from a visit there and had brought the vine wrapped in a bit of earth, delicately rooted in soil. She was proud now of the vine and of herself as its author. “See, Tony,” she said. “See.” They walked about the house to the north wall and traced the creeper to its last and most remote tendril high at the eaves above the north attic window, calling, “See here!” “See, Tony,” she said. “A hundred feet and over since it touched ground.”