For she thought her husband referred to her remark about the Bible, and not to her judgment of the scientific men.  And he did not correct her mistake.

“And plants, you see, dear, are not the same as trees,” she drove her advantage home, “not quite, that is.”

“I agree,” said David quietly; “but both belong to the great vegetable kingdom.”

There was a moment’s pause before she answered.

“Pah! the vegetable kingdom, indeed!” She tossed her pretty old head.  And into the words she put a degree of contempt that, could the vegetable kingdom have heard it, might have made it feel ashamed for covering a third of the world with its wonderful tangled network of roots and branches, delicate shaking leaves, and its millions of spires that caught the sun and wind and rain.  Its very right to existence seemed in question.

II

Sanderson accordingly came down, and on the whole his short visit was a success.  Why he came at all was a mystery to those who heard of it, for he never paid visits and was certainly not the kind of man to court a customer.  There must have been something in Bittacy he liked.

Mrs. Bittacy was glad when he left.  He brought no dress-suit for one thing, not even a dinner-jacket, and he wore very low collars with big balloon ties like a Frenchman, and let his hair grow longer than was nice, she felt.  Not that these things were important, but that she considered them symptoms of something a little disordered.  The ties were unnecessarily flowing.

For all that he was an interesting man, and, in spite of his eccentricities of dress and so forth, a gentleman.  “Perhaps,” she reflected in her genuinely charitable heart, “he had other uses for the twenty guineas, an invalid sister or an old mother to support!” She had no notion of the cost of brushes, frames, paints, and canvases.  Also she forgave him much for the sake of his beautiful eyes and his eager enthusiasm of manner.  So many men of thirty were already blase.

Still, when the visit was over, she felt relieved.  She said nothing about his coming a second time, and her husband, she was glad to notice, had likewise made no suggestion.  For, truth to tell, the way the younger man engrossed the older, keeping him out for hours in the Forest, talking on the lawn in the blazing sun, and in the evenings when the damp of dusk came creeping out from the surrounding woods, all regardless of his age and usual habits, was not quite to her taste.  Of course, Mr. Sanderson did not know how easily those attacks of Indian fever came back, but David surely might have told him.

They talked trees from morning to night.  It stirred in her the old subconscious trail of dread, a trail that led ever into the darkness of big woods; and such feelings, as her early evangelical training taught her, were temptings.  To regard them in any other way was to play with danger.

Her mind, as she watched these two, was charged with curious thoughts of dread she could not understand, yet feared the more on that account.  The way they studied that old mangy cedar was a trifle unnecessary, unwise, she felt.  It was disregarding the sense of proportion which deity had set upon the world for men’s safe guidance.