Page:Frank Owen - Woman Without Love (1949 reprint).djvu/138

 food with me but it has bad teeth and is therefore partial to soups and soft-boiled eggs."

Before the evening was far advanced, Jimmy was telling his innermost secrets. Mary was used to the ways of men and adroitly she led him on. He told of his plans, his hopes, his enthusiasms.

"I might be more of a success," he confessed, "if I catered to popular taste, but somehow I've simply got to write the way I want to. I'm writing a novel, a saga of the soil, perhaps because I know scarcely anything about country life and never lived on a farm. I couldn't even tell an oak tree if I saw it. But this story has bothered me for a long time. It is a story about a house, of how this strange house watches over the little motherless boy who lives in it. The house is his mother. And as I wrote it seemed to me that the plot was larger than my own first conception of it. Already I have planned to have this saga in five or six parts, each one a separate novel. I want to trace the development of one particular farm family, from early Colonial days in Boston clear down to the present day in Illinois. How this one family thrived and developed. What they did for their country, I mean the individual men, and what their country did for them. I guess I'm getting a bit incoherent. I always think so fast when I talk about this story that I get my words all tangled up. The first of the Trents had been a hawker of herbs and drugs in early America, prior to the Revolution. He owned a small farm outside of Boston where he raised the plants and flowers which he used in the concocting of various prescriptions, cough mixtures, liniments, bitters, cure-alls which were almost as successful in effecting cures as the intricate medicines which modern specialists in frock coats, gloomy faces and tortoise-rimmed glasses prescribe for trembling patients. Micajah Trent with his pack-horse took the long road from Boston on the North to the Carolinas on the South. And there were hundreds of people who watched for his coming each Spring as eagerly as small boys years later watched for the coming of the circus. Now and then he pulled aching teeth for unfortunate homesteaders, for pulling teeth