Page:So Big (1924).djvu/363

 fresh green things just peeping out of the earth. Hothouses. Coldframes. The farm.

It looked very trim and neat. The house, white with green shutters (Selina’s dream realized), smiled at them from among the willows that were already burgeoning hazily under the wooing of a mild and early spring.

“But I thought you said it was a small farm!” said General Goguet, as they descended from the car. He looked about at the acreage.

“It is small,” Dirk assured him. “Only about forty acres.”

“Ah, well, you Americans. In France we farm on a very small scale, you understand. We have not the land. The great vast country.” He waved his right arm. You felt that if the left sleeve had not been empty he would have made a large and sweeping gesture with both arms.

Selina was not in the neat quiet house. She was not on the porch, or in the yard. Meena Bras, phlegmatic and unflustered, came in from the kitchen. Mis’ DeJong was in the fields. She would call her. This she proceeded to do by blowing three powerful blasts and again three on a horn which she took from a hook on the wall. She stood in the kitchen doorway facing the fields, blowing, her red cheeks puffed outrageously. “That brings her,” Meena assured them; and went back to her work. They came out on the porch to await Selina. She was out on the west sixteen—the west sixteen that used to be unprolific,