“Oh, my stars!” crooned Pegeen, in ecstasy.
“Can you ride your horse?” she asked suddenly.
“Well, I just thought maybe you’d lend him to Miss Moran when you weren’t neighboring. She loves riding better than anything and she had a beautiful riding horse when she came, but he hurt himself jumping the pasture fence and died, and she couldn’t afford to get another. She’s the loveliest thing on horseback—but, do you know, she rides straddle just like a boy and she wears breeches and sometimes they show; folks here thought it was awful at first. They buzzed around to each other’s houses like a swarm of bees, talking about it, and they thought maybe Mr. Colby, the minister, ought to take it up. And he wouldn’t. He said she didn’t go to his church, and that anyway it wasn’t a thing for a single man to take up with a young lady. So then they thought the ladies’ aid would have to do something, but they sort of put it off, and then Mr. Frisbie went to Boston to spend a week with his rich brother that’s a minister in a big church there. He came back telling that the parks up there were simply full of ladies riding straddle and that his brother’s wife said all the richest and properest ladies wore breeches when they rode and that it was countrified to be shocked. So then everybody quieted down. Mrs. Neal says Ginsy Shalloway sent for a pattern for riding breeches, but I don’t believe she’s ever had a call for it.”
Archibald, who had been chuckling over the Valley’s consternation, had an inspiration.
“Peggy,” he said, “I wonder if Mrs. Neal could stable two horses for me. You and I are going to do our neighboring behind a pair—but remember, Peg, I never heard that the Smiling Lady rode. That extra riding horse is going to be a lucky accident. Incidentally, I’m going to teach you to ride him.”
“Oh, my stars!” The small girl crooned it again, from heart fullness. “And I didn’t even pray for you to come! If I could have thought of anything as nice as you, I’d have prayed for it, but I couldn’t. So I just said ‘God bless me’ and I guess He thought that meant sending you.”
“God bless you, Peg,” Archibald said very softly. He couldn’t remember having asked God to bless any one, since far away bedtimes in which a very small boy and a very loving mother and a certain little white bed in a cheerful nursery figured hazily. Come to think of it, he hadn’t been on speaking terms with God at all, since those old days; but here in the Happy Valley one met Him at every turn and He seemed very friendly.