Father and mother walked home alone, communing together in that pride-tinged-with-sadness that must, at times, come to all parents.
“And to think I was so worried! That hat-making, and then that special spell of idle mooning over something-or-nothing, nearly drove me frantic.”
“I suppose, after all,” mother mused on, surreptitiously wiping those prideful eyes, “that there is something in Inspiration, and the dear child just had to wait till she got it, and that she doesn't know any more than we do where it came from.”
“No, I daresay she doesn't.” But sometimes father was more like a friend than a parent, and that faint, unnoted stress was the only sign he ever gave of what he knew about this Inspiration.
As far back as Melissa Merriam could remember, she had lived with her family in the roomy, rambling, white-painted house on Locust Avenue. She knew intimately every detail of its being. She had, at various points in her childhood, personally supervised the addition of the ell and of the broad porch which ran round three sides of the house, the transformation of an upstairs bedroom into a regular bathroom with all the pleasing luxuries of modern plumbing, the installation of hardwood floors into the “front” and “back” parlours. She knew every mousehole in the cellar, every spider-web and cracked window-pane in the fascinating attic. And the yard without she also knew well: the friendly big elm which, whenever the wind blew, tapped soft leafy fingers against her own window; the slick green curves of the lawn; the trees best loved by the birds; the morning-glories on the porch which resembled fairy church bells ready for ringing, the mignonette in the flower-beds like fragrant fairy plumes, and the other flowers--all so clever at growing up into different shapes and colours when you considered they all came from little hard brown seeds. And she was familiar with the summerhouse back in the corner of the yard, so ineffably delicious in rambler-time, but so bleakly sad in winter; and the chicken-yard just beyond she knew, too--Missy loved that peculiar air of placidity which pervades even the most clucky and cackly of chicken-yards, and she loved the little downy chicks which were so adept at picking out their own mothers amongst those hens that looked all alike. When she was a little girl she used to wonder whether the mothers grieved when their children grew up and got killed and eaten and, for one whole summer, she wouldn't eat fried chicken though it was her favourite delectable.