"You see, it wouldn't be so bad," explained that work-driven, detail-harra.s.sed official, "if it were not for this girls' affair.

Even if they'd keep to themselves it wouldn't matter so much, but I understand there are to be tobogganings and skating-parties and socials--sort of a sleigh-ride-and-taffy-pull phase of the keep-the-young-people-on-the-farm movement, and I expect it will leave them a hundred per cent more of the hoyden, or a hundred per cent more buried in the Slough of Sentimentality than if they'd never been the object of an uplift."

"I expect it will be the best thing that ever happened to them," said Billy. "Were you ever so scared of a girl that when you went to a neighbor's in the evening you'd go around to the stable first and wait there till some of the boys came out and took you into the house, sort of under cover?"

"No," came witheringly from his superior.

"And did you ever find yourself left alone with a girl that you'd known or should have known all your life, a really good-sense, clever girl who must have had lots of ideas of her own, but neither of you could advance any conversation at all because you hadn't the first shade of a common ground or a common interest? There was nothing to do but try to imitate the smart talk of the imported store-clerk, or go, so because you didn't want to make a complete donkey of yourself you generally went?"

"I should say not."

"Or if you were an easy prey to the hoodlum element hanging around almost every country village, you possibly found your recreation in shooting peas from the back seat of the church at tea-meetings, or cutting harness, or stretching wires across the road on dark nights.

When you reached the age of more civil instincts the most alluring social interest was to follow the public b.a.l.l.s from one end of the country to the other. You met the same people, or the same cla.s.s of people, night after night, and you stayed till four o'clock in the morning. Before it was done half the men would be glazed-eyed and unsteady, and the girls looking dragged out, but sort of tolerating it all; and some of them the best girls in the country, too. They must have gone home heart-sick of it, but they always came back; you can't wonder much--there was a lot they didn't know and there wasn't any other excitement in their lives. A minister in the village here ventured the idea of fitting up a gymnasium in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the church and having moving pictures on Wednesday nights, but one old reprobate of an elder opposed it until it was dropped. He considered it profanity in the first degree, and anyway he didn't want his daughter going to picture shows or dressing up in gymnasium rigs, but every time she came down to the post office, a new arrival in the village who had come to open a pool-room over the carriage-shop, a social and moral worm, as every man in the place knew, walked part way home with her. She wouldn't have tolerated him a minute if she could have seen him in comparison with decent men, but her father didn't believe in the "safety in numbers" fact. She ran away with the pool promoter and married him, and all the time there were a dozen honest, well-intentioned fellows native to the farms around, any one of whom she might just as possibly have married, but didn't for the very good reason that she didn't know them. I believe this co-education venture will be the best move yet in the 'rural sociology' scheme."

"Well, then, before your enthusiasm cools, I wish you'd go and take a look at the hall we have to fix up for a demonstration kitchen."

Billy looked at the hall and reported. The next day he brought his tools, and according to directions improvised a table from some rough lumber, nailed some boxes together for a cupboard, then swept out his shavings and incidentally the dust from a year's meetings of the county council. On the third day he was commissioned to meet the train bringing the teacher.

Billy was not given to questioning orders, but he stopped unloading chairs from a wood-rack to look his chief over with open defiance.

"I'll do anything in reason," he said. "I'll haul the furniture from any part of the county till we get the place equipped. I'll blacken the stove or scrub the floor if I have to, but I don't feel at all equal to meeting any post-graduate domestic science girl and escorting her up to the Royal Hotel. I wouldn't be surprised if she'd sit right down on the steps and cry."

"More likely to sit right down and give you five minutes to find a better place or get a taxi to take her home."

"Only that there isn't any better place."

"Why won't some of the women take her?"

"Some of them claim to have had previous experience with 'lady speakers.' The general trouble, however, is that she comes from the city--is rumored to be something of an aristocrat and the people are afraid of her."

In spite of these scattered feelings of fear and hostility, the teacher had a pretty fair attendance the first day. The second day it seemed as though some one, probably the girls themselves, had done some additional advertising. Toward the close of the afternoon the Representative suggested to Billy that he go up and see if she wanted anything.

The cla.s.ses were over, but the girls were still there, and sounds unlike the sc.r.a.ping of pans or handling of dishes, or anything else pertaining to domestic science, came from the room. The door was open, and instead of finding the students bending over a yeast culture or copying the food const.i.tuents of cereals, he saw twenty or more girls coming down the hall practising the minuet. The teacher was there, with her back to him, demonstrating, of course; the girls themselves had never seen the minuet before--and Billy stood watching, open mouthed, for a full minute, before someone saw him, and the dance broke up in confusion. He came forward to apologize to the teacher and when she turned he remembered; she was the "committee girl."

The cla.s.s filed out bashfully, and the teacher gave Billy some idea of what she was trying to do. Evidently she thought some explanation was due. The minuet, she explained, was part of some physical culture she was working into the course, and he heartily approved. He had observed a neighbor's daughter, an awkward girl of sixteen, stiffened and sobered from the care of the family of younger children, actually relaxing and taking the bend with considerable grace. He had noticed the stolid, stoop-shouldered girl from the Home, whose pride, almost her self-respect, had been crushed out of existence, curving her spine and lifting her head in admirable imitation of Miss Macdonald's poise. He didn't wonder at this at all. If ever a school of physical culture turned out a model it must be this girl, with her slim, perfect physique, her quiet, supple carriage, her entire absence of self-consciousness. Her whole personality radiated a wholesomeness.

From her regular, white teeth, her hair still shining from the brush and sending out little rusty glints from the brown hollows where the light struck it, to her white linen uniform and cla.s.sy low-heeled shoes, she carried the mark of the thoroughbred. And feeling the warmth of her kind, happy eyes, hazel or gray or whatever they were, it didn't matter, Billy almost decided that these things were worth more than being pretty. He considered bringing Jean home from school for the two weeks--not for the sake of the course, just for the atmosphere.

In spite of her poise he surmised that she was taking her job pretty seriously.

"The playing part of it," she explained, "will be questioned a good deal, I'm afraid; it isn't outlined in the programme, but I believe it's almost the most important here. Most of the girls can cook pretty well; you can tell by the way they listen to the reasons why you put meat to cook in cold water for soup, and boiling water for a stew; and by the questions they ask about why specialists have decided that it's better to keep a baby's feeding four hours apart instead of two. You can't give them very much in two weeks, but they have so much that is practical to begin on that they can go right ahead and apply almost any principle they learn. When they're through here they should be able to take the best Home Economics literature and study for themselves. We're considering forming a 'Better Homes Club' and linking up with your Junior Farmers. What do you think?"

Billy accepted the idea with encouraging enthusiasm.

"That's why it seems that the social part of it should be started under some direction. Do the boys skate?"

"I'm afraid a lot of them don't. I never thought of such a thing until I left here."

"I'm going to teach some of the girls on the pond on Sat.u.r.day afternoon. If the boys were interested we could have some skating parties before we finish."

Billy spent some strenuous nights on the ice, getting the boys interested. At the end of the first week a bonfire of pine roots at the edge of the pond made the illumination for a union skating meet, a laborious exercise for some of the cla.s.s, but sending everyone home with a happy antic.i.p.ation for the next time. Before it was over Billy set out with Ruth to follow the creek for a few miles down through the moonlit stretches of frosted barrens. The girl skated as she did everything else, freely and easily with an expression of joy of living in every stroke. He had never seen such rhythmic, easy, independent motion in girls' athletics, and he wondered how she had acquired it.

"You must have taken to the out-doors soon after you learned to creep," he ventured.

"I imagine I was kept pretty closely under cover at that time. I know when I was seven years old people still thought I wouldn't grow up.

My mother died when I was a few weeks old and a well-intentioned aunt put me into an exquisite nursery in the attic of her big house, and got an expensive nurse to take care of me, but I just wouldn't thrive. It was a very patient and far-seeing teacher who took me to the fields and taught me to climb trees and spent nearly a whole summer overcoming my fears of the lake. Then suddenly one day I swam away from her; after that I began to live. There must be hundreds of children like that whom no one ever bothers with. Had we better go back?"

"Tired?"

"No, but I think we've come far enough."

She didn't look tired. Of all the glowing, happy, well-poised creatures under the heavens she seemed the most thoroughly alive.

Billy admired the quiet control that never sickened a pleasure with satiety, that reverenced a recreation enough to stop when it had recreated. He thought of the jaded girls he had seen dragging through after-midnight dances, in rooms reeking with air so poisoned that even the lamps burned blue and flickered, and he hoped she would teach them her creed of guarding her physical womanhood as a sacred trust. He hoped she could inspire a love for the clean out of doors that seemed to leave her tingling with the fires of pure oxygen.

Even the Representative, in spite of his prejudices, fell a convert to her social propaganda, and attended with less boredom than he had antic.i.p.ated the tobogganings and sleigh-rides and taffy-pulling functions. Instead of finding his young people "one hundred per cent more of the hoyden," he observed an unwonted dignity. He overheard a few conversations discussing landscape effects for the spring planting, and the practicability of power systems for the farms and homes of the districts. Instead of discovering his teen-age irresponsibles floundering "in the Sloughs of Sentimentality," he found a free and easy mixing of a few older people in every entertainment and none of the clandestine pairing off so general in some of their former affairs. He inquired how the parties and sleigh-rides always came to be chaperoned by some women of the neighborhood, and was informed that the girls arranged it. He marvelled that the gatherings always broke up not later than eleven o'clock, and heard from more than one mystified youth that the girls seemed to have some secret understanding; no one knew what had come over them.

On the last day of the course, when Billy returned from taking the boys to see the Aberdeen-Angus herd that had played such an important part in directing his own early interests, he found the Representative unusually worried, and interrupting his enthusiastic report of the day's proceedings with the irrelevant question:

"Have you seen Miss Macdonald to-day?"

Billy hadn't seen her.

"Well, she's got a beast of a cold, and looks like destruction," the Representative grumbled. "I wish she was out of that hotel. She never should have been there in the first place. I'll bet the walls are fairly dripping dampness, and you probably know that when she's at home she lives in a steam-heated, electric-ventilated palace of a place, with a kind of millionaire uncle."

"I didn't know."

"Queer she should care about knocking around at a job like this."

"What are you going to do about it?"

"What would I be likely to do about it? I suppose what she needs is mustard plasters and ginger-tea. What would you suggest that we do?"

Billy stared out the window for a minute.

"I guess I'll see if she'll come home with me and let my mother fix her up," he said.

The Representative contemplated the back of his a.s.sistant's head, wisely, for a minute, then decided he was wrong. He had never in his experience with agricultural undergraduates come across so little presumption and so much cool initiative. It made a puzzling combination.

Ruth heard his suggestion with surprised grat.i.tude. "It's just the most ordinary kind of a farm house," he apologized, "but I think it would be more comfortable and a lot safer than staying another night at the hotel."

She wasn't afraid of the farm house, but she hesitated at the imposition; she wasn't accustomed to such consideration. She also realized her danger, and it decided her.

Of the several things in Billy's later career that had heightened his mother's hopes for him, this was the crowning event, and in the whole of her orphaned life Ruth had never known so well how much she missed in not having a mother of her own. She felt no homesickness for her uncle's luxurious house and her aunt's efficient, methodical ministrations. She liked to lie in the deep feather bed with a flannel-wrapped hot brick at her feet; and she liked to have Billy's mother coming to see how she was getting on and staying to regret that he hadn't brought her sooner; and she liked the strong, nippy sweetness of her black currant drinks, even the warmth of her mustard plasters--and she _loved_ the mother herself.

Somehow Mary knew it, and was happy. She supposed she would have liked any girl Billy had brought home--certainly she would have tried. But such a girl! She had always treasured the hope that sometime there would be such a one, serious, and wise, and considerate--a girl who would sort of take his mother's place for a man when she had gone.

She confided the hope to Billy while they watched the fire the next night, and Ruth was probably having dinner in her uncle's house with no trace of her cold left other than an inconvenient red square on her chest that interfered with wearing the regulation dinner-gown. He looked up surprised. He stretched his imagination for some time, but he couldn't picture Marjorie Evison in any such capacity at all; neither could he see why any man would want such a thing. He was still pretty young.