"The chickens and the garden alone practically pay the rent," boasted Archie, "and this summer I'm going to set up a hog. Real money in hogs, Mr. Nikolai! Of course the house is pretty old-timey and plain,"--he indicated the low ceilings and deep-set, many-paned windows--"but Joan likes old-timey things. She says this is a country cousin to that old place I used to live in on Poplar Street. Says a house without any ghosts in it is as uninteresting as a house without any books in it." (Archie was always fond of quoting the sayings of his Joan.) "You do not miss people?" Nikolai asked her, recalling how easily the young American had made her place in what is perhaps the most finished society in the world. "I have no chance to. We have neighbors enough--nice country women who exchange patterns and recipes and cuttings with me, and even a book now and then. If I want another sort, it is easy enough to run into town--or even on to New York, now that I've the excuse of publishers to be seen! And lately the town has begun to come out to me. Not at first. Emily and the others had a good deal to say about the folly of burying oneself in the country. You see this is not Country Club or golf-course country. But now I notice that they're glad enough to come whenever I ask them--or even when I don't!--Oh, the peace of it, Stefan! At night you can positively hear the silence." "Amid the darkness that we feel is green," he said. She nodded. "And no formal callers to interrupt, and no ridiculous competitions with Mrs. Websters--I think people are more themselves in the country, somehow. Kentucky people, at any rate. Your Kentuckian does not run quite true to type herded in masses." "Hear the wise authorine!" beamed Archie. "Perhaps that is true of all Anglo-Saxons," she went on, unheeding. "They need to get their roots into the soil." "Not only of Anglo-Saxons, Joan--of Semitic people, of all people, I think," said Nikolai. "Humanity began in a garden, if we may believe our myths. And with all races the dream of the ultimate Paradise is a garden." "Why don't you put some roots out yourself?" asked Archie, eagerly. "There's a lot of good land about here for sale cheap. Why don't you buy some and settle down near us?" "Oh, do!" urged Joan. "What a splendid idea!" He looked from one to the other, the slight flush that had risen to his face dying away. "Thank you," he said quietly. "Thank you, my friends. Perhaps--some day." Joan remembered that he had spoken once of his intention to settle down near her and grow up with her children, "when he was old enough." Surely, she thought (quite unaware of any cruelty in her thought) he was old enough now!