In fact, the road up to Aunt Jed’s looked more like a river-bed than a road.  It had a gully and many “thank-you-ma’ams.”  It was plentifully sown with pebbles as big as your head and hard as flint, which gave tit for tat to every wheel that struck them.  Every time Mrs. Leighton ventured in Natalie’s cart—­and it was seldom indeed except to go to church—­she would say, “We really must have this road fixed.”

But Natalie would only laugh and say,

“Not a bit of it.  I like it that way.”

Natalie had bought for a song a little mare named Gipsy.  Nobody, man or woman, could drive Gip; she just went.  Whoever rode, held on and prayed for her to stop.  Gip hated that road down into the valley.  If she could have gone from top to bottom in one jump, she would have done it.  As it was, she did the next best thing.  What made you love Gip was that she came up the hill almost as fast as she went down.

Soon after Gip became Natalie’s, she awoke to find herself famous from an attempt to pass over and through a stalled motor-car.  After that the farmers used to keep an eye out for her, especially on Sundays, and give her the whole road when they saw her coming.  Ann Leighton said it was undignified to go to church like that, to which Natalie replied: 

“Think what it’s doing for your color, Mother.  Besides, think of church.  You must admit that church here has gone a bit tough.  I really couldn’t stand it except sandwiched between two slices of Gip.”

Aunt Jed’s house—­nobody ever called it anything else—­was typical of the old New England style, except that a broad veranda had been added to the length of the front by the generation that had outraged custom and reduced the best parlor and the front door to everyday uses.  This must have happened many years before Natalie’s advent, for a monster climbing rose of hardy disposition had more than half covered the veranda before she came.

The house itself was of clapboards painted white, and stood four square; its small-paned windows, flanked with green shutters, blinking toward the west.  It had a very prim air, said to have been absorbed from Aunt Jed, and seemed to be eternally trying to draw back its skirts from contact with the interloping veranda and the rose-tree, which, toward the end of the flowering season, certainly gave it a mussed appearance.  At such times, if the great front door was left open on a warm day, the house took on a look of open-mouthed horror, which immediately relapsed to primness once the door was closed.

Natalie was the discoverer of this evidence of personality.  Sitting under the two giant elms that were the sole ornament of the soft old lawn, she suddenly caught the look on the face of the house, and called out: 

“Mother, come here!  Come quickly!” as though the look couldn’t possibly last through Mrs. Leighton’s leisurely approach.

“What is it, dear?” asked Mrs. Leighton.