While we dined on the two red apples, the tangy nuts, and a few hard crackers that, I think, were dog-biscuits, I told him all about it, up to my defiance and assumption of the management of Elmnest in the library after dinner.
"I _can_ keep us from starving until I learn chickens, can't I?" I asked after the recital, and I crouched a little closer to him on the rock, for black shadows were coming in between the trees and into my consciousness, and all the pink moonlight had faded as a rosy dream, leaving the world about us silver gray.
"I wonder just how much genuine land passion there is in the hearts of women?" said Adam, softly answering my question with another. "The duration of race life depends upon it really."
"I don't know what you are talking about, but I understand you," I answered him hotly. "Also I know that I love that old sheep more than you do, and I'm going to get in line with my egg-basket when the United States begins mustering in forces to fight, no matter what it is to be. I wish I could say it like I feel it to that Mr. Secretary Evan Baldwin, who forgets that women are the natural--the nutritive sex."
"I wish you could," said kind Adam, with one of Pan's railing laughs.
"Don't laugh at me--I'm getting born all over, and it is hard," I said with a sob in my throat.
"Forgive me! I'm not really laughing--it's just a form--form of the Peckerwood's nature-worship," he answered as he took my hand in his warm one for a second. "Let's go finish up with old sheep mother," he added as he began to pad swiftly away up the path, drawing me after him.
"Yes, I _am_ growing inside," I assured myself as I for the second night fell asleep on the soft bosom of my family tradition of four posts.
One of the most bromidic performances that human beings indulge in anywhere from their thirty-fifth to eightieth years is to sigh, look wise, and make this remark: "If I could only begin life over again, knowing what I do now!"
I'm never going to be impressed by that again, and I'm going to answer straight out from the shoulder, "Well, it would be a great strain to you if you found yourself doing it."
That was about what my entry into life at Elmnest, Riverfield, Harpeth, was, and in many places it rubbed and hurt my pride; in many places at many times it sapped my courage; in many ways it pruned and probed into my innermost being with a searching knife to see if I really did have any intelligence or soul, and at all times it left me with a feeling of just having been sprouted off the cosmic. I know what I mean, but it doesn't sound as if I did. This is the way most of it happened to me in my first six weeks of life in the rustic.