“No, not quite,” she said, taking the heavy tool out of his hand.  If she were aware of the idle figure at the upper window, she gave no sign of it.  She laid her strong, long, flexible hands on the handle, saying, “So, you hold it this way.  Then you swing it up, back of your head.  There’s a sort of knack to that.  You’ll soon catch it.  And then, if the ground isn’t very hard, you don’t need to use any strength at all on the downward stroke.  Let Old Mother Gravity do the work.  If you aim it right, its own weight is enough for ordinary garden soil, that’s not in sod.  Now watch.”

She swung the heavy tool up, shining in the bright air, all her tall, supple body drawn up by the swing of her arms, cried out, “See, now I relax and just let it fall,” and bending with the downward rush of the blade, drove it deep into the brown earth.  A forward thrust of the long handle ("See, you use it like a lever,” she explained), a small earthquake in the soil, and the tool was free for another stroke.

At her feet was a pool of freshly stirred fragments of earth, loose, friable, and moist, from which there rose in a gust of the spring breeze, an odor unknown to the old man and thrilling.

He stooped down, thrust his hand into the open breast of earth, and took up a handful of the soil which had lain locked in frost for half a year and was now free for life again.  Over it his eyes met those of the beautiful woman beside him.

She nodded.  “Yes, there’s nothing like it, the smell of the first earth stirred every spring.”

He told her, wistfully, “It’s the very first stirred in all my life.”

They had both lowered their voices instinctively, seeing Vincent emerge from the house-door and saunter towards them immaculate in a gray suit.  Mr. Welles was not at all glad to see him at this moment.  “Here, let me have the mattock,” he said, taking it out of Mrs. Crittenden’s hands, “I want to try it myself.”

He felt an anticipatory impatience of Vincent’s everlasting talk, to which Mrs. Crittenden always had, of course, to give a polite attention; and imitating as well as he could, the free, upward swing of his neighbor, he began working off his impatience on the unresisting earth.  But he could not help hearing that, just as he expected, Vincent plunged at once into his queer, abrupt talk.  He always seemed to think he was going right on with something that had been said before, but really, for the most part, as far as Mr. Welles could see, what he said had nothing to do with anything.  Mrs. Crittenden must really be a very smart woman, he reflected, to seem to know what he meant, and always to have an answer ready.

Vincent, shaking his head, and looking hard at Mrs. Crittenden’s rough clothes and the handful of earth in her fingers, said with an air of enforced patience with obvious unreasonableness, “You’re on the wrong track, you know.  You’re just all off.  Of course with you it can’t be pose as it looks when other people do it.  It must be simply muddle-headed thinking.”