His gravity made us laugh
immoderately.
Lena's talk always amused me. Antonia had never talked like the people
about her. Even after she learned to speak English readily, there was
always something impulsive and foreign in her speech. But Lena had picked
up all the conventional expressions she heard at Mrs. Thomas's dressmaking
shop. Those formal phrases, the very flower of small-town proprieties, and
the flat commonplaces, nearly all hypocritical in their origin, became very
funny, very engaging, when they were uttered in Lena's soft voice, with her
caressing intonation and arch naivete. Nothing could be more diverting
than to hear Lena, who was almost as candid as Nature, call a leg a `limb'
or a house a `home.'
We used to linger a long while over our coffee in that sunny corner. Lena
was never so pretty as in the morning; she wakened fresh with the world
every day, and her eyes had a deeper colour then, like the blue flowers
that are never so blue as when they first open. I could sit idle all
through a Sunday morning and look at her. Ole Benson's behaviour was now
no mystery to me.
`There was never any harm in Ole,' she said once. `People needn't have
troubled themselves. He just liked to come over and sit on the drawside
and forget about his bad luck.
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