kindly way and put her hand to her hair, which was grayer now, but still very thick. She replaced a comb and smoothed the front of her skirt, which was a rich piece of cut velvet, purple with a black shading. She had gotten more stout, but, as tall as she was, she could carry the weight. She went on: “Did I show you the books I brought you, Margaret, dear? I remembered that you liked the Sherlock Holmes, so I brought you another book by Mr. Doyle, set during the Hundred Years’ War. And Mrs. Hitchens thought you might like her book of ghost stories that she read in the train. I must say, I heard her gasp once or twice in the upper sleeper!” She smiled again, and all of a sudden, surprising even herself, Margaret leaned forward and put her arms around Mrs. Early, and Mrs. Early held her to her breast and, for a moment or two, stroked her hair, and Margaret couldn’t help weeping. But then they stood up, and Andrew came in from his daily task of dropping the time ball.
The next day, the two ladies took a train to Napa to look about up there. Mrs. Lear filled them a picnic basket. It was a pleasure to cook for the two of them, of course, and Mrs. Early was very tactful about showing her some recipes she knew—pancakes in the French manner (“though the Germans love them, too, they are so thin and light, with a little confectioners’ sugar and some rough-cut marmalade, and, you know, Margaret, it doesn’t hurt a bit to warm up the marmalade and stir in a quarter-cup of rum. It’s very bracing first thing in the morning, and there’s absolutely no harm in it”).
From Napa, she and Mrs. Hitchens brought two tennis rackets and some balls for the Lear boys, and by the time Margaret was up the next morning, the ladies had strung a rope between two trees in the backyard, and induced someone to cut the grass very close. She had Theodore and Martin out, laughing and hitting one of the balls back and forth over the rope, while Hubert and Dorsett awaited their turns by swinging in the trees. Mrs. Hitchens was sitting in a chair, fanning herself with the morning paper, but Andrew’s mother was trotting back and forth, showing the boys how to grip their rackets and aim for the ball as it went by them. Martin seemed an apt pupil, already hitting the ball more than missing it; Hubert and Dorsett swung past her once or twice; then she saw Hubert perch himself up on the railing of the second-floor balcony and sit there, watching and rolling a cigarette, which he then smoked with a meditative air before swinging back to the tree. The whole scene was so lively and good-natured that Margaret thought of trying to persuade the two ladies to stay into the following week, just for her own enjoyment. Four days was hardly enough of them! And then, that afternoon, Mrs. Early enlisted both her and Mrs. Hitchens in teaching the boys “a nice game of Missouri poker, just a bit of five-card stud—which stands for ‘studious,’ boys, which is what you should be every day of school.” They used the boys’ stash of matches for chips, and she ensured that while they were learning they lost, but once they knew the principles of the game, they each won a bit, which she paid them out of her own bag, a half-dollar apiece.
When Margaret suggested that evening that the two ladies stay longer, Mrs. Early exclaimed, “Oh, goodness! You will have quite another dose of us after we have had our fill of the great city of San Francisco, and the famous Palace Hotel. Mr. Enrico Caruso is performing Carmen, which I have never seen, so we can’t miss that. I assure you that, by the time we head east, you will be glad to see us go.” Margaret laughed, but she couldn’t imagine being glad to see them go.
With his mother, Andrew was much as he had been in Missouri, polite and even jovial, but taciturn by comparison with his customary manner. He told about the gunshots into the mud, which made his mother laugh, and she said, “My goodness, Andrew, that is clever! And you made drawings of the craters? What if you made photographic plates of them, wouldn’t that be extraordinary? I wonder how you would