John Hunter was at the side gate to assist his wife and baby out of the sled. He left Elizabeth to carry Jack to the house and went to the barn to help Noland put the team away. This man, who took milking as a lark, and all farm work as a thing to be desired, and yet was a gentleman, was to John Hunter, who scorned these things as beneath himself, an anomaly. It had never occurred to John that labour of that sort could have dignity, nor that a man could choose it as a livelihood unless driven to it. It had never occurred to him that if driven to it one should enter into it as a real participant. To him it was a thing to endure for a time and never refer to after it could be put behind him. The beauty of the dawn, the pleasant odours of new-mown hay, the freshness of the crisp air, the association with the living creatures about him, the joys of a clean life, all escaped him. Hugh Noland had enumerated these things, and many more, while they had worked together that afternoon, and John Hunter accepted the enumeration, not because it was fundamentally true, but because it was the estimate of a cultured and well-educated man.
John Hunter had been vexed at Elizabeth for the sangfroid with which she had walked away from established custom in ordering the team prepared for her to be taken to Nathan's, but with Noland present he had accepted it without remark. Here was a man before whom John would always, but instinctively rather than premeditatively, endeavour to show his best side.
Hugh Noland went to the house with John, talking farm work and prices of produce as if they were matters of pleasant as well as necessary importance, and he set John to talking in his best vein and without superciliousness; he had the faculty of bringing out the best in the people he met. He brought some of his books--he had stopped at the Chamberlain homestead for his trunk on their return that evening--and added them to those already on the Hunter shelves. While arranging them, he sat on the floor before the bookcase and glancing over the titles of those belonging to the family, opened an occasional one and read aloud a verse or a paragraph or two. He read with zest and enthusiasm. He was fresh from the world of lectures and theatres, and the social life of the city, and became a rejuvenating leaven for this entire household.