what to do.

"Been over the whole garden twice and eaten several meals in the sweat
of my brow--that is, I took a cold shower before coming to the table, my
daughter," father said, and he looked ashamed of himself for being proud
of his own spurt of normality. I caught my breath, but I was wise enough
not to show my astonishment. "Goodloe is the most insinuating person I
ever met, and I advise you to be careful. He makes men do just as he
wants them to, and I should say that women would eat out of his hand."

"I suppose I ought to eat a bite or two from his fingers to pay for all
the work he has got out of you and Dabney. I never saw the garden so
beautiful or so early. Look, father, the peonies are budding, two weeks
ahead of their usual time!"

"They'd be damned ungrateful not to grow industriously, after the way
Dab and I have sprained our old backs spading and feeding them according
to spiritual direction that stood over us with a rake," answered
father, with proud if profane enthusiasm. There was a faint pink glow in
his haggard, thin cheeks, and he took from his pocket a huge knife I had
never seen him use before and began carefully to cut away a few dead
twigs from a budding rose vine.

"Your mother always put a rose from this vine at my plate for breakfast,
and you got yours from that pink bush over there by the sun dial," he
said, with a softness in his voice that I had not heard since my tenth
summer, in which my mother had died. I tingled all over, but held on to
myself.

"You go tell that old black lazybones to come here with his spade this