I have a guest who is the best of the three kinds of welcome guests. Of these some are like a new rug which, however fine and unobtrusive it be, at first changes the character of your room so that when you enter you are less conscious of the room than of the rug. Some guests are like flowers on the table, leaving the room as it was save for their sweet, novel presence. And some guests are like a prized new book, unread, from which you simply cannot keep away. Of these last is my guest whom my neighbour calls the New Lady.

My neighbour and Elfa and Miggy and Little Child and I have all been busy preparing for her. Elfa has an almost pathetic fondness for "company,"—I think it is that she leads such a lonely life in the little kitchen-prison that she welcomes even the companionship of more-voices-in-the-next-room. I have tried to do what I can for Elfa, but you never help people very much when you only try to do what you can. It must lie nearer the heart than that. And I perfectly understand that the[Pg 177] magazines and trifles of finery which I give to her, and the flowers I set on the kitchen clock shelf, and the talks which, since my neighbour's unconscious rebuke, I have contrived with her, are about as effectual as any merely ameliorative means of dealing with a social malady. For Elfa is suffering from a distinct form of the social malady, and not being able to fathom it, she knows merely that she is lonely. So she has borrowed fellowship from her anticipation of my guest and of those who next week will come down from the town; and I know, though she does not know, that her jars of fresh-fried cakes and cookies, her fine brown bread and her bowl of salad-dressing, are her utmost expression of longing to adjust the social balance and give to herself companionship, even a kind of household.

Little Child to-day came, bringing me a few first sweet peas and Bless-your-Heart, Bless-your-Heart being her kitten, and as nearly pink as a cat can be and be still a cat.

"To lay in the New Lady's room," she remarked, bestowing these things impartially upon me.

Later, my neighbour came across the lawns with a plate of currant tarts and a quarter of a jelly cake.

"Here," she said, "I don't know whether you like tarts or not. They're more for children, I always think. I always bake 'em, and the little round child fried cakes, too, and I put frosting faces[Pg 178] on the cookies, and such things. It makes my husband and I seem more like a family," she explained, "and that's why I always set the dining-room table. As long as we ain't any little folks running around, I always tell him that him and I would be eating meat and potatoes on the kitchen drop-leaf like savages if I didn't pretend there was more of us, and bake up for 'em."

Miggy alone does not take wholly kindly to the New Lady idea, though I assure her that our mornings are to remain undisturbed.

"Of course," she observed, while in the New Lady's honour she gathered up strewn papers, "I know I'll like her because she's your friend. But I don't know what folks want to visit for. Don't you s'pose that's why the angels don't come back—because they know everything, and they know what a lot of extra work they'd make us?"

In Miggy the tribal sense seems to have run itself out. Of the sanctity of the individual she discerns much; but of the wider sanctities she has no clear knowledge. Most relationships she seems to regard, like the love of Peter, as "drawbacks," save only her indefinite consciousness of that one who is "not quite her sister"—the little vague Margaret. And this, I think, will be the leaven. Perhaps it is the universal leaven, this consciousness.

I was glad that the New Lady was to arrive in[Pg 179] the afternoon. Sometimes I think that the village afternoon is the best time of all. It is no wonder that they used to call that time "undern." If they had not done so, the word must have grown of its own will—perhaps it did come to life with no past, an immaculate thing, so like its meaning that it could not help being here among us. I know very well that Sir John Mandeville and others used "undern" to mean the third hour, or about nine in the morning, but that may have been because at first not every one recognized the word. Many a fairy thing wanders for a long time on earth, patiently putting up with other connotations than its own. Opportunism, the subconscious mind, personality, evolution itself,—all these are still seeking their full incarnations in idea. No wonder "undern" was forced for a long while to mean morning. But nine o'clock in the morning! How, after all, was that possible? You have only to say it over—undern, undern, undern,—to be heavenly drowsy with summer afternoon. The north of England recognized this at last and put the word where it belongs; and I have, too, the authority of the lady of Golden Wing:—
"Undern cometh after noon,
Golden Wings will be here soon...."

One can hardly stop saying that, once one is started. I should like to go on with it all down the page.

[Pg 180]

I was thinking of these things as I drove to the station alone to meet the New Lady. The time had taken on for me that pleasant, unlike-itself aspect which time bears in any mild excitement, so that if in the moment of reading a particularly charming letter one can remember to glance up and look the room in the face, one may catch its other expression, the expression which it has when one is not looking. So now I caught this look in the village and an air of Something-different-is-going-to-happen, such as we experience on holidays. Next week, when the New Lady's friends come down to us for two days, I dare say, if I can remember to look for it, that the village will have another expression still. Yet there will be the same quiet undern—though for me it is never a commonplace time. Indeed, usually I am in the most delighted embarrassment how to spend it. In the mornings now—Miggy being willing—I work, morning in the true democracy being the work time; afternoon the time for recreation and the more specialized forms of service and a little rest; the evening for delight, including the delight of others. Not every one in the village accepts my afternoon and evening classifications. I am constantly coming on people making preserves after mid-day, and if I see a light in a kitchen window after nine at night I know that somebody is ironing in the cool of the day. But[Pg 181] usually my division of time is the general division, save that—as in the true democracy—service is not always recognized as service. Our afternoons may be spent in cutting carpet rags, or in hemming linen, or sewing articles for an imminent bazaar, and this is likely to be denominated "gettin' through little odd jobs," and accounted in a measure a self-indulgence. And if evening delight takes the form of gardening and later a flame of nasturtiums or dahlias is carried to a friend, nobody dreams that this is not a pleasant self-indulgence too, and it is so regarded. With these things true is it not as if a certain hope abroad in the world gave news of itself?

Near the Pump pasture I came on Nicholas Moor—who rings the Catholic bell and is interested in celluloid—and who my neighbour had told me would doubtless come to me, bringing his little sheaf of "writin's." I had not yet met him, though I had seen in the daily paper a vagrant poem or two over his name—I remember a helpless lyric which made me think of a gorgeous green and gold beetle lying on its back, unable to recover its legs, but for all that flashing certain isolated iridescent colours. My heart ached for Nicholas, and when I saw him now going across the pasture his loneliness was like a gap in things, one of the places where two world-edges do not quite meet. There are so many pleasant ways to do and the boy seemed[Pg 182] to know how to do none of them. How can he be lonely in the village? For myself, if I decide of an afternoon to take my work and pay a visit, I am in a pleasant quandary as to which way to turn. If I go to the west end of Daphne Street, there are at least five families among whom to choose, the other four of whom will wonder why I did not come to them. Think of knowing five families in two blocks who would welcome one's coming and even feel a little flattering bitterness if one chose the other four! If I take a cross street, I am in the same difficulty. And if I wish to go to the house of one of my neighbours, my motives clash so seriously that I often sit on my porch and call to whoever chances to be in sight to come to me. Do you wonder that, in town, the moment I open my address book I feel smothered? I recover and enjoy town as much as anybody, but sometimes in a stuffy coupé, hurrying to get a half-dozen of the pleasantest calls "done," I surprise a companion by saying: would now that it were undern on Daphne Street!

I told this to the New Lady as we drove from the station. The New Lady is an exquisite little Someone, so little that it is as if she had been drawn quickly, in a single delicate curving line, and then left, lest another stroke should change her. She understands the things that I say in the way that I mean them; she is the way that you always think[Pg 183] the people whom you meet are going to be, though they so seldom are; like May, she is expectation come alive. What she says fits in all the crannies of what you did not say and have always known, or else have never thought of before and now never can forget. She laughs when she should laugh, and never, never when somebody else should laugh alone. When you tell her that you have walked eight miles and back, she says "And back!" with just the proper intonation of homage. She never tells a story upon the heels of your own little jest so sw............