"Ann, what is it that makes you so perfectly radiantly beautiful in that faded linen smock and old corduroy skirt? Of course, you always were beautiful, but now you look like--like--well, I don't know whether it is a song I have heard or a picture I have seen." Bess leaned down and laid her cheek against mine for a second.
"I'm going to tell you some day before long," I whispered as I kissed the corner of her lips. "Now do take the twin fathers for a little spin up the road and make them walk back from the gate. They have been suffering with the Trojan warriors all day, and I know they must have exercise. Uncle Cradd walks down for the mail each day, but father remains stationary. Your method with them is perfect. Go take them while I supper and bed down the farm."
"I know now the picture is by Tintoretto, and it's some place in Rome," Bess called back over her shoulder as she drove her car slowly around to the front door to begin her conquest and deportation of my precious ancients.
"Not painted by Tintoretto, but by the pagan Pan," I said to myself as I turned into the barn door.
When I came out with a bucket of the new wheat in my hand, I heard Bess and her car departing, with Uncle Cradd's sonorous speech mingling with the puff of the engine.
"We are all alone, Mr. G. Bird, and we love it, because then we can talk comfortably about our Mr. Adam," I said to the Golden Bird as he followed me around the side of the barn where a door had been cut by Pan himself to make an entry into my improvised chicken-house.
Suddenly I was answered by a very interesting chuckling and clucking, and I turned to see what had disengaged the attention of Mr. G. Bird from me and my feed-bucket. The sight that met my eyes lifted the shadow that had lain between the Golden Bird and me since the morning I had taken him in to see his newly arrived progeny and had not been able to make him notice their existence. Stretching out behind me was a trail of wheat that had dripped from a hole in the side of the bucket, and along the sides of it the paternal Bird was marshaling his reliable foster-mother, Mrs. Red Ally's and all his own fluffy white progeny. With exceeding generosity he was not eating a grain himself, but scratching and chortling encouragingly.