" He pulled down a slender
birch, and, setting his foot on it, broke it off at the root.
She stopped, with an impatient gesture, and waited while he tore
off handfuls of leaves and whittled away the side-shoots.
"Do hurry, Lewis!" she said.
They had left their train at five o'clock in the morning, and had
been sitting in the frowsy station, sleepily awaiting the express,
when Athalia had had this fancy for climbing the hill so that she
might see the view.
"It looks pretty steep," her husband warned her.
"It will be something to do, anyhow!" she said; and added,
with a restless sigh, "but you don't understand that, I suppose."
"I guess I do--after a fashion," he said, smiling at her.
It was only in love's fashion, for really he was incapable
of quite understanding her. To the country lawyer of sober
piety and granite sense of duty, the rich variety of her moods
was a continual wonder and sometimes a painful bewilderment.
But whether he understood the impetuous inconsequence of her
temperament "after a fashion," or whether he failed entirely
to follow the complexity of her thought, he met all her fancies
with a sort of tender admiration. People said that Squire Hall
was henpecked; they also said that he had married beneath him.
His father had been a judge and his grandfather a minister;
he himself was a graduate of a fresh-water college, which later,
when he published his exegesis on the Prophet Daniel, had conferred
its little degree upon him and felt that he was a "distinguished son.
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