She leaned back, in good humour. Hagar had given her an opportunity to express herself very well. "Don't you, too," she asked, "feel at home with the dear old imperfection?"
Mrs. LeGrand shrugged. "Oh, well!" she said, "I suppose each will fight for the place that is home."
Hagar looked beyond her, to her kindred. "You're all opponents," she said. "Alike you worship God as Man, and you worship a static God, never to be questioned nor surpassed. You have shut an iron door upon yourselves.... One day you who shut it, you alone--you will open it, you alone. But I see that the day is somewhat far."
She rose. "I was going anyhow you know, grandfather, in four days. But I can take the morning train if you'd rather?"
But Colonel Ashendyne said stiffly that if she had forgotten her duty, he had not his, and that the hospitality of Gilead Balm would be hers, of course, for the four days.
Hagar listened to him, and then she looked once more around the circle. A smile hovered on her lips and in her eyes. It broadened, became warm and sweet. "I'll accept for a time the partial estrangement, but I don't ever mean that it shall be complete! It takes two to make an estrangement." She went up to her grandmother and kissed her, then said that she was going for a walk.--"No, Ralph, you are not coming with me!"
She went down the porch steps, and moved away in the evening glow. The black cedars swallowed her up; then upon the other side, beyond the gate, she was seen mounting the hill to the right. The sun was down, but the hilltop rested against rose-suffused air, and above it swam the evening star.
Ralph spoke with a certain grim fury. "I wish the old times were back! Then a man could do what he wished! Then you didn't feel yourself caught in a net like a cobweb that you couldn't break--"
Mrs. LeGrand again opened her fan. "I am very fond, of course, of dear Hagar, but I must say that she seems to me intensely unwomanly!"
It seemed strange to be back at the Maines', staying a fortnight with Rachel while the apartment was being looked for. Nothing had been moved in that house; it was all just the same, only the tone of time was deeper, the furniture more worn, the prints yellower. She asked for and was given the third-floor back room again, though, indeed, Mrs. Maine protested that now that she was famous!... Bessie had changed as little as the house. More grey hairs, somewhat more flesh, a great many more pounds of chocolate creams to her credit--that seemed all. She was still amiable, sleepily agreeable, comely, and lazy. Powhatan, except to grow greyer and leaner, had not altered either. The old servants held on. With some inevitable variations the same people came in the evenings--the Bishop's nephew and the St. Timothy people, and Powhatan's downtown acquaintances, and chance visitors from the other side of Mason and Dixon's.