Mrs. Rodney retired within the flap of her sun-bonnet after the evening meal, settling herself in the rocking-chair as if it were some sort of conveyance.  Her family, who might have told the hour of day or her passing mood by the action of the chair, knew by her pacific gait that she would lament the unbuilt bird-house no more that night.  The snuff-brush, newly replenished from the tin box, kept perfect time to the motion of the chair.  With the lady of the house it was one of the brief seasons of passing content vouchsafed by an ample meal and a good digestion.

Warren Rodney took down a gun from the wall and began to clean it.  His hands had the fumbling, indefinite movements, the obscure action, directed by a brain already begun to crumble.  His industry with the gun was of a part with the impotent dawdling in the garden.  His eyes would seek for the rag or the bottle of oil in a dull, glazed way, and, having found them, he would forget the reason of his quest.  Not once that evening had they rested on his wife or any member of his family.  He had shown no interest in any of the small happenings of home, the frank rivalry of Eudora’s suitors, the bickerings of the girls and boys over the division of household labor.  The one thing that had momentarily aroused his somnolent intelligence was a revival of his wife’s plaint anent the unbuilt bird-house.  That, and a certain furtive anxiety during supper lest his daughter Eudora should forget to keep his plate piled high, were the only signs of a participation in the life about him.

From one of the rooms that opened to the world like a stage to the audience, Mrs. Rodney kept her evening vigil.  The last faint amethystine haze on the mountains was deepening.  They towered about the valley where the house lay, with a challenging immensity, mocking the pitiful grasp of these pygmies on the thousand hills.  The snow on the taller of the peaks still held the high lights.  But all the valleys and the spaces between the mountains were wrapped in sombre shadows; the crazy house invading the great company of mountains, penetrating brazenly to the very threshold of their silent councils, seemed but a pitiful ant-hill at the mercy of some possible giant tread.  The ill-adjusted family, disputing every inch of ground with the wilderness, became invested with a dignity quite out of keeping with its achievements.  Their very weaknesses and vanities, old Sally still clinging to her sun-bonnet and her limp rose-colored skirts, an eternal requiem for the dead and gone complexion, lost the picturesqueness of the pioneer and ranked as universal qualities, admissible in the austerest setting.  Perhaps in some far distant council of the Daughters of the Pioneers a prospective member of the house of Rodney would unctuously announce:  “My great-great-grandmother was a Miss Tumlin of Tennessee; great-great-grandfather’s first wife had been a Sioux squaw.  Isn’t it interesting and romantic?”