I SAT on my doorstep and admired the crickets in lazy joy, while I steeped myself in the sweetness and promise of my great possession and of my three great wishes. For the first time in my life I was able to sit at ease without needing the anesthetic of paper and pencil. I could do nothing and stare lovingly around me and feel a luxurious happiness, that simple gift which I had envied so much in others. My house and land were a token payment, which had given me kinship with the earth at last. Now even I was in the secret, rapturously at home. I remember how different my face began to feel, on account of a most unfamiliar sensation which came over it. It was a smile that simply couldn’t leave my face for any length of time, and, constantly returning, it kept warming me all through. And while I smiled on the doorstep I could hear the workmen laughing inside the house. I could hear their footsteps and the slow rumble of their talk, and every now and then a great burst of laughter. Sometimes a fit of noisy hammering or sawing would discreetly drown from my ears the story or the joke that came just before their loud guffaws. Once in a while one of the men would come to speak to me about the work and ask me to decide something. They smiled good-naturedly, they were deferential toward me, and also protective, as they might have been toward a pleasant, well-bred child who for some reason had temporary authority over them. Their deference as well as their protectiveness seemed natural to me, because I think I felt that I was something set apart, a special and a rather important little package, containing ideas and talents and a vision of life which they were not capable of understanding. I felt toward them all, even toward Frank Grindle, who was different from the others, a rather prim, virginal, modestly superior, benevolent affection. As a workman and artist myself in my own medium, I had a fellow feeling toward them because of their workmanship, and I enjoyed the warm human reassurance I got from having them around me. What they thought of me I cannot imagine, but if they could have known the thoughts and plans that were in my head concerning my house, and especially the third wish, I suppose that not all their hammers and saws going at once in full chorus could have drowned their wild peals of laughter. With all of my alleged advantages, sensitiveness, talents, reading, friends, cultivated family, sweet temper, philosophical calmness, conquest of despair, and altogether refined superiority, I had still quite a long rough road ahead of me before I should have learned as much as the laughing workmen knew.
At first when the men and I had been talking over the work and I had described what I wanted done, or later on, when I had watched and commented and made suggestions as the work developed, the men had all told me at one time or another how smart, or bright they thought I was. They said it in a very friendly, beaming way, as though they really admired my brightness and took real pleasure in praising me. In paying me their compliments they seemed even rather possessive and proud of me, a little as though I were a child they had adopted. I discovered later that they believed, like my nieces, that I was not really grown up. For when my birthday came on October second, and I was thirty-four, Lorna and I talked about ages and we found that we were the same age. She declared she couldn’t believe I was so old. She thought I was ten years younger than herself. Then she told me that when I first bought the house people in the village were talking about me, and reported that I was a young girl of seventeen; they were all saying how strange it was that I should be allowed by my family (if I had a family, which some of them doubted) to buy a house all alone. When Lorna told me this quaint piece of gossip I laughed, but she said emphatically and quite seriously, “Don’t tell anybody your age. Let them go right on thinking you are a very bright child!” I found it so charming that I quietly followed Lorna’s advice and kept right on, as long as I was able to manage it fairly easily, being a very bright child.
I was used to having some casual acquaintance mistake me now and then for ten or so years younger than I was, but I had never met anyone before who had taken off quite so many years from my age as the Castine people. My nurserylike hygiene, which my mother had impressed upon me as being necessary for my health, may have preserved a certain freshness in my appearance, but whenever I heard anyone express surprise on being told my age it made me think of Alexander Pope, for one of his contemporaries had said something about him that was equally true of me. “His body,” he said, “is shaped like a pair of scissors, and he has the face of a child.” Then another contemporary, on hearing the remark, added, “Yes, but it is the face of a child who has been in hell.” I felt curiously guilty when nobody made that amendment in describing me, for it seemed to me that somewhere in my young-looking face, and, if nowhere else, surely in my eyes, must be the evidence that I was another such experienced child. I had been initiated into an awareness of things that my parents did not even dream of, and I still carried all by myself a constant awareness of the fatal principle of imperfection, of accident, of mutilation, and of obstruction which exists in the universe side by side with a design that appears to be as flawless and symmetrical as a snow crystal. Instead of feeling pleased and triumphant when anybody said I looked very young it almost always cast a shadow over me, a somber uncomfortable feeling as if I were carrying a dreadful secret that was being concealed from them. I did not feel this way about the mistake the Castine workmen made, for I thought I was much more mature than they and I had become so through my prolonged suffering and inner life of imagination. It was going to take some little time for the education by Castine to break through, some little time for me to learn after all that I was exactly what the men had thought me—nothing more than a very bright child, too bright, so bright I hadn’t even known enough to grow up.