As he glanced at me, his face dimpled with a seizure of
irrelevant merriment, and he shot up the windmill tower with a lightness
that struck me as disdainful. I knew he was peering down at me as I walked
toward the house.
Ducks and geese ran quacking across my path. White cats were sunning
themselves among yellow pumpkins on the porch steps. I looked through the
wire screen into a big, light kitchen with a white floor. I saw a long
table, rows of wooden chairs against the wall, and a shining range in one
corner. Two girls were washing dishes at the sink, laughing and
chattering, and a little one, in a short pinafore, sat on a stool playing
with a rag baby. When I asked for their mother, one of the girls dropped
her towel, ran across the floor with noiseless bare feet, and disappeared.
The older one, who wore shoes and stockings, came to the door to admit me.
She was a buxom girl with dark hair and eyes, calm and self-possessed.
`Won't you come in? Mother will be here in a minute.'
Before I could sit down in the chair she offered me, the miracle happened;
one of those quiet moments that clutch the heart, and take more courage
than the noisy, excited passages in life. Antonia came in and stood before
me; a stalwart, brown woman, flat-chested, her curly brown hair a little
grizzled.
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