There are thousands of very pretty girls who have no love for beauty save their own, which they do their best to spoil by self-homage.  To Mildred, on the contrary, the beautiful was as essential as her daily food, and she excelled in all the dainty handicrafts by which women can make a home attractive.  Therefore her own little sanctum had developed like an exquisite flower, and had become, as we have said, an expression of herself.  An auctioneer, in dismantling her apartment, would not have found much more to sell than if he had pulled a rose to pieces, but left intact it was as full of beauty and fragrance as the flower itself.  And yet her own hands must destroy it, and in a brief time she must exchange its airy loveliness for a bare room in a farmhouse.  After that the future was as vague as it was clouded.  The pretty trifles were taken down and packed away, with tears, as if she were laying them in graves.

CHAPTER V

THE RUDIMENTS OF A MAN

“Mother, I hain’t no unison with it at all,” said Farmer Atwood, leaning on the breakfast table and holding aloft a knife and fork—­formidable implements in his hands, but now unemployed through perturbation of mind.  “I hain’t no unison with it—­this havin’ fine city folk right in the family.  ’Twill be pretty nigh as bad as visiting one’s rich relations.  I had a week of that once, but, thank the Lord, I hain’t been so afflicted since.  I’ve seen ’em up at the hotel and riding by too often not to know ’em.  They are half conceit and half fine feathers, and that doesn’t leave many qualities as are suited to a farmhouse.  Roger and me will have to be—­what was it that lecturin’ professor called it—­’deodorized’ every mornin’ after feedin’ and cleanin’ the critters.  We’ll have to put on our go-to-meetin’s, instead of sittin’ down in our shirt-sleeves comfortable like.  I hain’t no unison with it, and it’s been a-growing on me ever since that city chap persuaded you into being cook and chambermaid for his family.”  And Farmer Atwood’s knife and fork came down into the dish of ham with an onslaught that would have appalled a Jew.

“The governor is right, mother,” said the young man referred to as Roger.  “We shall all be in strait-jackets for the summer.”

The speaker could not have been much more than twenty years old, although in form he appeared a full-grown man.  As he stood wiping his hands on a towel that hung in a corner of the large kitchen, which, except on state occasions, also served as dining and sitting-room, it might be noted that he was above medium height, broad-shouldered, and strongly built.  When he crossed the room his coarse working dress could not disguise the fact that he had a fine figure and an easy bearing of the rustic, rough-and-ready style.  He had been out in the tall, dew-drenched grass, and therefore had tucked the lower part of his trousers in his boot tops, and, like his father,