They walked on under the budding trees up the hill, till they came at last to the small frame house set under tall maples and locust trees, just showing a feathery fringe of foliage.
"This is our home," said Robert.
Mate leaned on the gate in silence. Frogs were peeping. The smell of spring was in the air. There was a magnificent repose in the hour, restful, recreating, impressive.
"Oh, it's beautiful, Robert! I know we shall like it."
"We must like it," he said.
II
First contact with the people disappointed Robert. In the work of moving in he had to do with people who work at day's work, and the fault was his more than theirs. He forgot that they did not consider their work degrading. They resented his bossing. The drayman grew rebellious.
"Look a-here, my Christian friend, if you'll go 'long in the house and let us alone it'll be a good job. We know what we're about."
This was not pleasant, and he did not perceive the trouble. In the same way he got foul of the carpenter and the man who plowed his garden. Some way his tone was not right. His voice was cold and distant. He generally found that the men knew better than he what was to be done and how to do it; and sometimes he felt like apologizing, but their attitude had changed till apology was impossible.
He had repelled their friendly advances because he considered them (without meaning to do so) as workmen, and not as neighbors. They reported, therefore, that he was cranky and rode a high horse.
"He thinks he's a little tin god on wheels," the drayman said.
"Oh, he'll get over that," said McLane. "I knew the boy's folks years ago-tip-top folks, too. He ain't well, and that makes him a little crusty."
"That's the trouble-he thinks he's an upper crust," said Jim Cullen, the drayman.
At the end of ten days they were settled, and nothing remained to do but plan a little garden and-get well. The boys, with their unspoiled natures, were able to melt into the ranks of the village-boy life at once, with no more friction than was indicated by a couple of rough-and-tumble fights. They were sturdy fellows, like their mother, and these fights gave them high rank.
Robert got along in a dull, smooth way with his neighbors. He was too formal with them. He met them only at the meat shop and the post office. They nodded genially and said, "Got settled yet?" And he replied, "Quite comfortable, thank you." They felt his coldness.
Conversation halted when he came near and made him feel that he was the subject of their talk. As a matter of fact, he generally was.
He was a source of great speculation with them. Some of them had gone so far as to bet he wouldn't live a year. They all seemed grotesque to him, so work-scarred and bent and hairy. Even the men whose names he had known from childhood were queer to him. They seemed shy and distant, too, not like his ideas of them.
To Mate they were almost caricatures. "What makes them look so-so 'way behind the times, Robert?"
"Well, I suppose they are," said Robert. "Life in these coulees goes on rather slower than in Chicago. Then there are a great many Welsh and Germans and Norwegians living way up the coulees, and they're the ones you notice. They're not all so." He could be generous toward them in general; it was in special cases where he failed to know them.
They had been there nearly two weeks without meeting any of them socially, and Robert was beginning to change his opinion about them. "They let us severely alone," he was saying one night to his wife.
"It's very odd. I wonder what I'd better do, Robert. I don't know the etiquette of these small towns. I never lived in one before, you know. Whether I ought to call first-and, good gracious, who'll I call on? I'm in the dark."
"So am I, to tell the truth. I haven't lived in one of these small towns since I was a lad. I have a faint recollection that introductions were absolutely necessary. They have an etiquette which is as binding as that of McAilister's Four Hundred, but what it is I don't know."
"Well, we'll wait."
"The boys are perfectly at home," said Robert with a little emphasis on boys, which was the first indication of his disappointment. The people he had failed to reach.
There came a knock on the door that startled them both. "Come in," said Robert in a nervous shout.
"Land sakes! did I scare ye? Seem so, way ye yelled," said a high-keyed nasal voice, and a tall woman came in, followed by an equally stalwart man.
"How d'e do, Mrs. Folsom? My wife, Mr. Folsom."
Folsom's voice was lost in the bustle of getting settled, but Mrs.
Folsom's voice rose above the clamor. "I was tellin' him it was about time we got neighborly. I never let anybody come to town a week without callin' on 'em. It does a body a heap o' good to see a face outside the family once in a while, specially in a new place.
How do you like up here on the hill?"
"Very much. The view is so fine."
"Yes, I s'pose it is. Still, it ain't my notion. I don't like to climb hills well enough. Still, I've heard of people buildin' just for the view. It's all in taste, as the old woman said that kissed the cow."
There was an element of shrewdness and sell-analysis in Mrs.
Folsom which saved her from being grotesque. She knew she was queer to Mrs. Bloom, but she did not resent it. She was still young in form and face, but her teeth were gone, and, like so many of her neighbors, she was too poor to replace them from the dentist's. She wore a decent calico dress and a shawl and hat.
As she talked her eyes took in every article of furniture in the room, and every little piece of fancywork and bric-a-brac. In fact, she reproduced the pattern of one of the tidies within two days.
Folsom sat dumbly in his chair. Robert, who met him now as a neighbor for the first time, tried to talk with him, but failed, and turned himself gladly to Mrs. Folsom, who delighted him with her vigorous phrases.
"Oh, we're a-movin', though you wouldn't think it. This town is filled with a lot of old skinflints. Close ain't no name for 'em. Jest ask Folsom thar about 'em. He's been buildin' their houses for 'em.
