supper when he reached the table, an unexpected delay having arisen in
the barn, and he had eaten the unappetizing scraps that remained
hurriedly, without taking time to shave and bathe and change his clothes.
He had never gone to Sylvia in this manner before; but he strode down the
path to her house with a bitter satisfaction in his heart that she was to
see him when he was looking and feeling his worst, and that she would
have to take him as he was, or not at all. He found her in her garden
cutting roses, a picture of dainty elegance in her delicate white
fabrics. She greeted him somewhat coolly, as if to punish him for his
lack of deference to her on his last visit, and his subsequent neglect,
and glanced at his costume with a disapproval which she was at no pains
to conceal. Then with a sarcasm and lack of tact which she had never
shown before, she gave voice to her general dissatisfaction.

"_Really, Austin_, don't come near me, please; you're altogether too
_barny_. Don't you think you're carrying your devotion to the nobility of
labor a little too far, and your devotion to me--if you still have
any--not quite far enough? You're slipping straight back to your old
slovenly, disagreeable ways--without the excuse that you formerly had
that they were practically the only ways open to you. If you're too proud
to accept my money and the freedom that it can give you, and so stubborn
that you make a scene and then won't come near me for days because I
refuse to go to a cheap little public dance with you--"

She got no farther. Austin interrupted her with a violence of which she
would not have believed him capable.

"_If_! If you're too stubborn to go with me to my sister's _graduation
ball_, and too proud to accept the fact that I'm a _farmer_, with a
farmer's friends and family and work, and that _I'm damned glad of it_,