her husband's appetite with the mixed wonder and concern that thirty
years' knowledge of its capacities had not diminished. He studied her face
meanwhile; he was accustomed to reading faces, and hers he knew by line and
precept. He listened to her choked little laughs and hurried speeches. All
her talk was mere postponement; she was fighting for time. Hence he argued
that the trouble which had sent her flying home to him from the mountains
was not fancy-bred. Of her imaginary troubles she was ready enough to
speak.

The moon had risen, a red, dry-weather moon, when they walked out into
the garden and climbed the slope under low orchard boughs. The trees were
young, too quickly grown; like child mothers, they had lost their natural
symmetry, overburdened with hasty fruition. Each slender parent trunk was
the centre of a host of artificial props, which saved the sinking boughs
from breaking. Under one of these low green tents they stopped and handled
the great fruit that fell at a touch.

"How everything rushes to maturity here! The roses blossom and wither
the same hour. The peaches burst before they ripen. Don't you think it
oppresses one, all this waste fertility, such an excess of life and good
living, one season crowding upon another? How shall we get rid of all these
kindly fruits of the earth?"

She did not wait for an answer to her morbid questions. They moved on up
a path between hedges of sweet peas going to seed, and blackberry-vines
covered with knots of fruit dried in their own juices. A wall of gigantic
Southern cane hid the boundary fence, and above it the night-black pines of
the forest towered, their breezy monotone answering the roar of the hundred
stamps below the hill.