Page:Traveler from Altruria, Howells, 1894.djvu/159

Rh lightly; her remarkable mind had kept her body in a sort of sympathetic activity, and at thirty-five she had the gracile ease and self-command of a girl.

"Ah, Reuben," she sighed, permitting herself to call him by his first name, with the emotion which expressed itself more definitely in the words that followed, "how I envy you all this dear old, home-like place! I never come here without thinking of my grandfather's farm in Massachusetts, where I used to go every summer when I was a little girl. If I had a place like this, I should never leave it."

"Well, Mrs. Makely," said young Camp, "you can have this place cheap, if you really want it. Or almost any other place in the neighborhood."

"Don't say such a thing!" she returned. "It makes one feel as if the foundations of the great deep were giving way. I don't know what that means, exactly, but I suppose it's equivalent to mislaying George's hatchet, and going back on the Declaration generally; and I don't like to hear you talk so."

Camp seemed to have lost his bitter mood, and he answered pleasantly, "The Declaration is all right, as far as it goes, but it don't help us to compete with the western farm operations."