Naturally, she was unsympathetic.  If people were in pain, or cold, or hungry, Alix could sympathize.  But for mental and spiritual troubles she had small sympathy.

“Almost everybody in the world could live as simply as we do!” she told Peter.

“It costs us about four thousand a year!” he said.

“Well, it needn’t.  We could buy fewer clothes, and keep only one cow, and let the cook go!  We’d be just as happy.”

“To some people,” Peter had objected, doubtfully, more than once, “there are other things than clothes and food!”

“What things?”

“Well, various things.”

“We have books, flowers, music, all out-of-doors,” Alix protested, briskly.

“Sympathy, my dear—­interpretation self-expression!”

“Tommyrot!” she had responded without animosity.  He realized with surprise, not many months after their marriage, that she meant what she said.  If she ate and slept and walked and read with her usual healthy relish, she needed nothing more.  She was the least exacting of wives.  If he was late for a meal, she smiled at him absently, or if, after they had entertained, he apologetically approached her with some reference to an unfortunate sentence or circumstances, she would meet him with a cheerful: 

“Angel boy, I never heard you even, or if I did I don’t remember it—­even if I had heard it, it’s true!”

She was one of the rare women who can take marriage calmly, as a matter of course; she had done so since the hour that made her his wife.  At her illness she had rebelled; she hated nurses and their fuss, she said.  She was perverse with doctors.  In an unbelievably short time her magnificent constitution had responded; she was well again, at his side at the steamer rail, as eager for the sights and sounds and smells of Hawaii as if she had never heard of a sick room.

Her only sentiment was for the babies and small animals.  She would cuddle rabbits or birds against her brown, lean cheek, and hug her setter enthusiastically.  Peter suffered an agony of sympathy whenever she spoke of a child.

“I’d hate all the preliminary fussing, Pete—­we both would!  But oh, if the Lord would send me six or eight of them!”

Then and then only did the bright eyes and the confident voice soften, and then only was Alix no longer a flat, straight, splendid boy, but a woman indeed.

CHAPTER XII

Cherry, Peter saw at once, was different in every way.  Cherry was full of softness, of ready response to any appeal, of sympathy and comprehension.  She had been misunderstood, unhappy, neglected; she had developed through suffering a certain timidity that was almost a shrinking, a certain shy clinging to what was kind and good.

Her happiness here was an hourly delight to both Alix and himself.  She seemed to flower softly; every day of the simple forest life brought her new interest, new energy, new bloom.  She and Alix washed their hair again, dammed the creek again, tramped and sang duets again.  Sometimes they cooked, often they went into the old senseless spasms of laughter at nothing, or almost nothing.