During dinner I was deeply interested in father's plans for my garden,
which brilliantly carried the plans Nickols and I had made to what I saw
in another year would be a marvelously artistic completeness. But under
the joy of hearing him talk as I had never really heard him since I was
old enough to appreciate his scintillating delicious choice of words and
phrases, I was hot and sore at the thought of my duty to render
gratitude where gratitude was due for having him like that.

"It will be perfectly wonderful, father, and Nickols had not worked it
out to anything like that completeness. He will be wild about it, but
won't it take a lot of money? And where did you get your inspiration?" I
asked the question, though I hated the answer I knew it must receive.

"The plans are entirely my own," answered father, with a pleased flush
making even brighter his dulled eyes and cheeks, faintly glowing from
the shower at which Dabney had officiated a few minutes before. I had
not failed to notice that we had sat down and were halfway through
dinner and father's hand had not motioned Dabney towards the decanter
and ice and siphon on the sideboard. "I must confess that the
inspiration came from a kind of rage when Goodloe said to me how much it
was to be regretted that all the great gardens in the North are being
made out of a sort of patchwork of English, French, Italian and even
Japanese influences. You couldn't expect anything more of the
inhabitants of the part of the country in the veins of whose people flow
just about that mixture of blood, but in the Harpeth Valley we have been
Americans for two and a half centuries, and I'll show 'em an American
garden if it does unhinge both mine and Dabney's backs and make Cockrell
swear I'm crazy when he audits my accounts once every month. No, Madam,
your own grandmother and great-grandmother, in conjunction with
Goodloe's maternal ancestors, conceived and laid out the beginning of