A voice joined me in laughter, Maria Maxwell’s, from inside the open window of the dining room.  Looking toward the sound, I saw that, though the dining table itself had been cleared, a side table drawn close to the window was set with places for two, a posy of poets’ narcissus and the last lilies-of-the-valley between, while a folded napkin at one place rested on a newspaper!

“I thought we were to get our own breakfasts,” I said, in a tone of very feeble expostulation, which plainly told that, at that particular moment, it was the last thing I wished to do.

“You are, the very minute you feel like it, and not before!  You must let yourselves down gradually, and not bolt out of the house as if you had been evicted.  If Bart went paperless and letterless this very first morning, until he has met something that interests him more, he would think about the lack of the news and the mail all day until they became more than usually important!” So saying, Maria swept the stems and litter of the flowers she had been arranging into her apron, and annexing the Infant to one capable finger, all the other nine being occupied, she went down the path toward the garden for fresh supplies, leaving Ann-stasia, as the Infant calls her, to serve the coffee, a prerogative of which she would not consent to be bereft, not even upon the plea of lightening her labours!

“Isn’t this perfect!” I exclaimed, looking toward a gap in the hills that was framed by the debatable knoll on one side and reached by a short cut across the old orchard and abandoned meadows of the farm above, the lack of cultivation resulting in a wealth of field flowers.

“Entirely!” assented Bart, his spoon in the coffee cup stirring vigorously and his head enveloped in the newspaper.  But what did the point of view matter:  he was content and unhurried—­what better beginning for a vacation?  In fact in those two words lies the real vacation essence.

Meanwhile, as I munched and sipped, with luxurious irresponsibility, I watched Maria moving to and fro between the shrubs that bounded the east alley of the old garden.  In her compressed city surroundings she had always seemed to me a very big sort of person, with an efficiency that was at times overpowering, whose brown eyes had a “charge bayonet” way of fixing one, as if commanding the attention of her pupils by force of eye had become a habit.  But here, her most cherished belongings given room to breathe in the spare room that rambles across one end of the house, while her wardrobe has a chance to realize itself in the deep closet, Maria in two short days had become another person.